Kaminsky tells Drake about Lev Mishkin and David Lazareff, two Ukrainian Jewish nationalists who have suffered lifetimes of abuse and discrimination by the anti-Semitic Soviet authorities and are ready to take any actions that strike against the USSR.

Chairman Maxim Rudin, while a hard-line Communist who has ruled with an iron hand for a long time, knows that the pro-war faction's plan would result in an all-out nuclear war because the West would otherwise be vassals on a planet dominated by the Soviet bloc.

The news of the war plan comes to British intelligence agent Adam Munro through a Russian woman, his former lover Valentina, who works in the Kremlin offices and has access to the records of Politburo debates.

While the Politburo covers up the truth of Ivanenko's death, Mishkin and Lazareff hijack a Soviet airliner to escape from Ukraine but are arrested in West Berlin after one of the pilots is shot dead during landing.

U.S. President Bill Matthews receives information from the British that the USSR will cease negotiations regarding grain and military concessions if the prisoners are released, so there appear to be only two potential outcomes: the greatest oil spill in history, or a Soviet invasion of western Europe.

In the epilogue, Rudin proclaims a relative moderate (someone who believes that the Soviet Union will eventually rule the world but will do so gradually and without resorting to nuclear weapons) from the peace faction as his successor.

The novel features many real-life people with their names disguised; British Prime Minister Joan Carpenter is Margaret Thatcher (who had only recently become the PM at the time the novel was published); American president William "Bill" Matthews is James "Jimmy" Carter (although the fictional Matthews is finishing up his 2nd term of office in the book, while Carter was nearing the end of his 1st and only Presidential term in 1979); his Polish National Security Advisor Stanislaw Poklewski is Zbigniew Brzezinski; and Secretary of State David Lawrence is Cyrus Vance.