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In Britain, 1953 seemed to presage the dawn of a bright, new Elizabethan era, as a glamorous young queen was crowned amid pomp and pageantry in Westminster Abbey and the shackles of post-war austerity began to be loosened.
But all of this was threatened as the Cold War entered its most dangerous phase.
This was the new nuclear age, with the United States and the Soviet Union - both now equipped with thermonuclear devices that dwarfed the atom bombs dropped over Hiroshima and Nagasaki - squaring up in political and military battles all around the globe.
With every city a potential battleground, every citizen a target, there were no safe areas.
AUTHOR: Roger Hermiston's previous books were the acclaimed All Behind You, Winston, the compelling story of the men and women in Churchill's government who helped win the war; The Greatest Traitor, a biography of the Cold War spy George Blake; and Clough and Revie, the story of the fierce rivalry between those two great football managers. Roger was a print and broadcast journalist before turning to full-time writing. He was a reporter and feature writer on the Yorkshire Post before joining the BBC in the early 1990s. The bulk of his career at the corporation was devoted to the Radio 4 Today programme, where he was assistant editor from 1999 to 2010.
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