During his forced residence at a deep underground offensive-warfare complex, X-127 is ordered to push missile firing buttons to begin World War III (which lasts a total of 2 hours and 58 minutes).

It later emerges that the orders given have been wholly automatic due to a launch on warning strategy;[2] the war has taken place as a series of automated electronic responses to an initial accident.

As Level 7's safety falls into question, its inhabitants confront their growing isolation, overconfidence in technology, loneliness below a dead world, and the insanity of a society whose momentum toward annihilation exceeded its collective will to live.

In any case, specific national identities are arguably irrelevant to the book's themes of dehumanization, the abstraction of nuclear warfare, and the danger that this leads to when combined with the destructive potential of the weapons involved.

The novel thus acts as a warning against the nuclear arms race, as the original (but later removed) postscript makes clear: This book is neutral - in the sense that it does not defend either the East or the West.

It is submitted for the benefit of the West and the East, as well as anybody caught in between.The Diary of Push-Button Officer X-127 is intended as a preventative anti-radioactive medicine, good for consumption in any place in the world.