Vulkan: the evil empire's last gamble

Global terror takes many forms. Anti-terrorist squads worldwide try to foresee what the next nightmare might be. But have they thought of this one? And even if they have, how can a country reliably protect its home waters from intrusion by a weapon almost impossible to detect? This is the story that David Shirreff has spun, whose sheer plausibility should chill the spine. Did it actually happen in the mid-1980s, and is it continuing now? Draw your own conclusions. Project Vulkan was originally Moscow's answer to President Ronald Reagan's multi-billion-dollar Star Wars programme. What better - and cheaper - response could there be than to smuggle a compact nuclear warhead into the heart of every metropolis in the Western alliance? Moscow's top-secret mission is run by a bunch of patriotic, but fallible, former cosmonauts. Only by chance do Western agents get wind of it, with a predictably flat-footed response. And only one man, William Pike, publisher of a magazine on specialist weaponry, sees the full magnitude of the threat posed by Vulkan. This novel is no mere fantasy. For decades Nordic countries have experienced unexplained activity in their home waters. This offers a glimpse of what lies behind it: not just Soviet submarines in trouble, but a plot to terrorise the Western world by stealth. If that technology could create panic in the dying days of the Cold War, how much more can it do so today in the hands of a terrorist group? As William Pike speculates: "If they can fly planes into the twin towers they can certainly turn other forms of transport into lethal weapons."