American F-15 fighters scramble to intercept them in a scene of white-knuckled suspense. Russian Tu-95 Bear bombers overfly Alaskan airspace in defiance of international law. Spooked by the present (presumably Republican) Administration's plan to deploy a new space-based defensive system and hoping to act while the West is still adjusting to the changes in the Kremlin and its policies, Zhilinkov and his backers in the Defense Ministry and KGB foment a series of escalating confrontations with forces of the U.S. Now backed by like-minded members of the Central Committee, Zhilinkov wants to reimpose the Communist Party's authority on the "liberalized" Soviet society, reassert the USSR's role in the world as a superpower, and eventually, defeat the United States once and for all. ![]() had been ousted from the Politburo in 1988 due to his resistance to perestroika and glasnost. Soviet hardliners, led by Viktor Pavlovich Zhilinkov, hire a Libyan Army officer to shoot down Gorbachev's Ilyushin Il-62 VIP plane as it takes off from Sheremetyevo Airport on one of the General Secretary's foreign trips. The book begins in what was, at the time, the near-future 1990s. Weber, a retired Marine Corps aviator and - before becoming a full-time author - corporate jet captain based in Colorado, had no illusions about the CPSU, its conservative (in Soviet terms) "old guard," or the notion that a more radicalized Union of Soviet Socialists Republics (USSR) would be more aggressive toward the United States if Gorbachev was either forced out of power or - in this fictional version of 1989 Russia - assassinated. ![]() Navy carrier on the dust jacket art, such a development in the Soviet Union's internal affairs is not going to be a pleasant one. Judging from the novel's title (a reference to the Pentagon's Defense Readiness Conditions - DEFCONs - highest level) and the stark silhouette of a U.S. Novato, California-based Presidio Press (now owned by Ballantine Books) published Joe Weber's DEFCON One, a techno-thriller that imagined what would happen if Soviet hardliners "disposed of" then-General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) Mikhail Gorbachev and reversed his liberalization policies of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring).
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