Red Storm Rising is Tom Clancy's monumental 1986 novel of a Third World War, written with wargame designer Larry Bond and standing entirely apart from his Jack Ryan books. When a devastating act of sabotage cripples the Soviet Union's main oil production, a desperate Kremlin gambles on seizing the Persian Gulf's oil fields -- and to do it, it must first neutralize NATO. What follows is a full-scale conventional war in Europe and across the North Atlantic, fought without recourse to nuclear weapons.
Clancy tells the war from dozens of vantage points: fighter and bomber crews, the officers of a lone U.S. frigate hunting submarines in brutal Atlantic seas, tank commanders on the German plains, Kremlin planners, and a small band of American airmen stranded on occupied Iceland whose intelligence could tip the balance. The scope is enormous, but the detail is granular and convincing, grounded in Bond's wargaming and Clancy's obsessive research into hardware and tactics.
Widely regarded as one of the finest modern war novels, Red Storm Rising is a masterclass in large-scale military storytelling -- a tense, technically dazzling depiction of how a global conflict might actually be fought, and one of only two Clancy novels set outside the Ryanverse.