What’s interesting to me about that book is that it describes the US invasion of Grenada – years before the actual US invasion of Grenada. Evidently a plan has been in the works for quite a while,.
Hackett wrote a sequel four years later The Third World war ---- The Untold Story.
Trinity’s Child and the movie made from it By Dawn’s Early Night.
Both are excellent.
Wow, this is a fantastic list, thank you very much!
My library probably doesn’t carry most of these because we have a pretty sci-fi-poor fiction section, but I will encourage people to use interlibrary loan. 
I was just poking around Amazon on this topic- has anyone read Long Voyage Back? I’ve read a lot of apocalypse fiction but I’d never read that one- and I’ve read Malevil, which is kind of obscure.
My recommendation would be a YA novel, Z for Zachariah. It’s about a young girl living all alone shortly after an attack. It haunted me as a kid and held up upon reread as an adult.
Even most Heinlein fans put this one somewhere near the bottom of the list, but it is one of the few novels I know of that get right down in the trenches about surviving an all-out nuclear war. You can skip the middle part (once the aircraft show up) and jump to the last chapter if the survival part is all that matters. Probably better in some ways.
Yes, definitely check that out. Good stuff. Written as if it were an actual rueful history.
Warday, mentioned above, includes a chapter written from the POV of a senior Pentagon official who’s on Air Force One as the horrified President has to respond to a limited Soviet nuclear attack. It’s quite gripping.
I would also recommend The Last Ship by William Brinkley, set aboard the USS Nathan James, a destroyer. It opens in the Barents Sea in late 1988 when the warship, on authenticated orders from Washington, launches a Tomahawk cruise missile nuclear strike against the USSR. The rest of the book is about the aftermath of the full-scale nuclear war, and the crew’s struggle for survival in a war-ravaged world. Has some very implausible bits, but is well worth a read. For more: The Last Ship - Wikipedia.
Two earlier threads that might also be of interest:
Harold Coyle’s Team Yankee is a novel about a US armoured unit set in the same ‘world’. Chieftains is simillar but from the perspective of a British tank unit.
There is also a series called The Zone:
I’m reading this thread with interest as this topic is a personal interest of mine, I’ve read/watched most of the titles mentioned already but there’s a few I need to check out.
Agreed, though its one of those rare instances where I personally prefer the movie. Excellent ending and some memorable scenes (the look on Powers Boothe’s face as he looks out the window of the bomber at the results of the nuclear bomb they just dropped, when his character first begins to have doubts about their mission)
Again great book, the scene where the survivors from Air Force One are on a beach and watch as a nearby city is attacked (chalky-grey light flickering on the underside of the cloud-layer) sticks out in my mind, such a sparse description of hundreds of thousands of people being killed.
Its a pity the proposed sequel telling the story of Warday from the Soviets perspective never came to pass.
Domain by Frank Herbert does a good job of depicting a nuclear attack on London, its a horror novel with some quite silly elements but its a fun read and the first chapters are very well done. The attack is shown from the perspective of several different characters, some of whom survive but most don’t.
Haven’t read ‘Team Yankee’ yet but ‘Chieftains’ is a great book with a memorable ending.
As mentioned in the thread I started about The Road another good, but even more depressing book is ‘Level 7’ by Mordechai Roshwald, about a soldier sent to a top-secret facility as tensions escalate leading to war.
A book that may be hard to track down but is an excellent read is ‘Ende: A Diary of the Third World War’ by Anton-Andreas Guha about a family near the inner-German border during the Cold War when a nuclear exchange takes place.
James Herbert’s ‘Dominion’. It’s set mostly in the aftermath of Nuclear War, but it does briefly cover before and during the war.
http://www.amazon.com/Domain-James-Herbert/dp/0330522086/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1368090652&sr=8-4&keywords=domain
And I should have read through the thread thoroughly before allowing myself to be pipped to the post!
It’s James Herbert - you’ve got the plot right though.
Don’t know why I wrote Frank, James Herbert died recently as well. I’m not a fan of horror novels but some of his were pretty good.
I just want to second this - it’s a profoundly moving story about a couple of “little people” unaware of the growing danger around them or the full import of what subsequently happens.
Shelter by Dan Ljoka
Sparrow Rock by Nate Kenyon. Though it borders on fantasy, it’s realistic in psychological effects.
Z for Zachariah by Robert C. O’ Brien. A must.
The Bomb by Theodore Taylor
Any fiction of Hiroshima/ Nagasaki. (Grave of the Fireflies, etc.)