This 200-page novel was written in 1970 and is squarely set in a political world where communism is still seen as the greatest threat to American society. In this case, a renegade colonel in the service of the Peoples Republic of China uses the horror and confusion of the historical Cultural Revolution to realize a plan of detonating a nuclear bomb over New York City. Author Robert Buchard uses actual Chinese officials from the era as characters in his narrative including Mao Zedong (Mao Tse-Tung ), Liu Shaoqi (Liu Shao-chi ), and Luo Ruiqing (Lo Jui-ching). While the story focuses on the oppressive governmental system of Mao's and Shaoqi's China, Burchard capably presents a system that no one is able to truly control. In such an instance, Colonel Ni is able to fully unleash his diabolical plans using his many years of training spies and playing political chess within the Chinese Communist Party's military and political elite. What becomes truly fascinating is that the story looks at a plausible terrorist attack on the United States just two decades before the actual events of September 11, 2001 in New York. ( )

I first read Thirty Seconds over New York in the mid-1970s, and I finally tracked it down again in 2005. Originally in French, it's a short (inelegantly written) thriller about a Chinese plot to explode a nuclear weapon over New York, using an airliner as the delivery vehicle. The 9-11 terrorists weren't the first to think of using airliners as weapons.