All the President's Men

Co-author of All The President's Men and one of the two Washington Post journalists (the other was Carl Berntstein) who broke the Watergate scandal that brought down the President Richard Nixon administration in the United States in 1974, Bob Woodward's recent book War was on top of The New York Times Bestseller list, even above John Grisham.

Woodward is a double Pulitzer-winning journalist and author of 23 books. War reads like a breathless thriller, only all the characters are real and all the conversations between presidents, heads of states, important officials are meticulously cross-checked and recorded. In this excerpt, Woodward proves how close Russia came to using nuclear weapons against Ukraine when things didn't go according to plan, and this threat is not neutralised even today.

AT the White House, Jake Sullivan and Jon Finer were in overdrive. The key piece of the intelligence assessment was the 50 percent chance Russia would use a tactical nuclear weapon. The assessment had gone from around a 5 percent chance, to a 10 percent chance to now a coin flip. Finer felt a gut-wrenching foreboding.

White Sullivan often found a “false precision” in the intelligence, especially with regard to numbers, the 50 percent assessment could not be dismissed. Even before this intel assessment, he carried the worry that at some moment during the war Putin would resort to nuclear use.