A story of wartime intelligence, super-power relations and spies and
their handlers - seen through the experience of Melita Norwood.On September 11th 1999 The
Times newspaper carried the front page article "e;Revealed: the quiet woman who
betrayed Britain for 40 years. The spy who came in from the Co-op."e; Melita
Norwood, the last of the atomic spies, hadfinally been run to ground, but at 87 she was
deemed too old to prosecute. Her crime: the shortening of the Soviet Union's atomic bomb
project by up to 5 years. At a time when the world faces fresh dilemmas caused by the
proliferation of nuclear weapons, this is the remarkable story of a much earlier drama.
After the atomic bomb strikes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, British and American
intelligence estimated the earliest date for the production of a Soviet bomb to be 1953. In
fact, the Soviet Union went nuclear in 1948, and tested an atomic bomb in 1949. The Soviet
Union's bomb coincided with the onset of The Cold War, and threatened humankind with
extinction. Melita Norwood was a member of one of those communist spy networks in America
and Britain, who by guaranteeing those weapons of mass destruction threw down a challenge to
America as sole superpower in the post-Second World War era. This fascinating book sets her
in the context of the times, and uses her as a prism and focus through which to investigate
the whole milieu. Dr DAVID BURKE is a Supervisor for the Rise of the Secret World:
Governments and Intelligence Communities since 1900 at the University of Cambridge.

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• Politics & Social SciencesWar & Peace

• Publication Date: October 16, 2008
• Text-to-Speech: Disabled
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• Print Length: 234 Pages
• File Size: 16 KB