Fail-Safe

Fail-Safe is a 1962 political thriller novel by Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler, first serialized in the Saturday Evening Post during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Set in the near future of 1967, it imagines an electronic failure that sends a mistaken attack order to six American bomber aircraft carrying nuclear weapons toward Moscow. The president works to recall the planes, but one aircraft breaks through Soviet defenses, and to avert a full scale nuclear war he ultimately chooses to let an American city be destroyed rather than let Moscow be destroyed without an equivalent loss. The novel was adapted into films in 1964 and 2000.