The Lion Sleeps Tonight: January 1962

Welcome to the Timeline 10/27/62 prequel series COUNTDOWN TO WAR starting in October 1961 and concluding when the world goes mad during the last weekend in October 1962.

January 1962 and the new year dawns with the West and the Soviet Union locked in rhetorical sabre-rattling, with both side’s leaders deaf to – or perhaps, more accurately – in denial about the other’s problems.

From sunny California to windswept Lincolnshire the shadow of war is ever-present, the leader of the free world exhorts his people to build bomb shelters, Nikita Khrushchev periodically threatens to rain nuclear brimstone on his enemies but for most people there is the routine of their normal lives, while the military go about their duties preparing for the worst. Thinking the unthinkable used to be the preserve of philosophers, sooth-sayers but not now.

Beneath the seething waters of international high politics an assassin is on the run in France, in Moscow the KGB have recalled its most ruthless manhunter to keep the lid on a brewing spy scandal, and to others their missteps in love almost but not quite, blind them to the madness of the world. From sunny California to Malta, to winter in England, life goes on beneath the gathering storm clouds.

The countdown to war has reached ten minutes to midnight…