Vladimir Putin was so close to using nuclear weapons in October 2022 that Liz Truss spent the dying days of her premiership preparing for the potential fallout, an updated version of her biography has claimed.
The former prime minister reportedly spent her last days in office studying weather maps and preparing for cases of radiation poisoning in the UK amid US intelligence a strike was imminent.
Ms Truss had been told the Russian president was just hours from deploying a nuke, which Whitehall officials feared would hurl radioactive material into the atmosphere which could spread 1,700 miles from the blast, according to Out of the Blue, an unauthorised biography of the short-serving former PM.
An updated edition of the book, by journalists Harry Cole and James Heale, said Ms Truss spent “numerous hours studying satellite weather data and wind directions” over fears the “wrong weather patterns” could have a “direct fall-out effect on Britain”.
There was reportedly “exquisite” intelligence from the Americans that pointed to a 50 per cent chance of Russia using either a tactical nuke in Ukraine or a larger bomb over the Black Sea.
Extracts of the book, published by The Sun, set out the horrifying details of how close the war came to a nuclear escalation.
It added that, on October 18 that year, then defence secretary Ben Wallace travelled to Washington to discuss the crisis. At the same time, US president Joe Biden said there was a “direct threat” of Russia deploying nuclear weapons if “things continue down the path they are going”. “A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought,” Mr Biden said at the time.
The updated version of Out of the Blue follows the publication of Ms Truss’s own book, Ten Years To Save The West, which contained a series of bombshell claims about her 49 days in office.
Ms Truss, who lost her seat at the general election, claimed she thought “why me, why now?” after learning the Queen had died, and said Boris Johnson’s dog left fleas in No 10.
The former PM’s book also detailed how her husband predicted her premiership “would all end in tears”.
She wrote about the moment she learnt that her predecessor, Mr Johnson, was forced to resign.
Ms Truss was in Bali at the time as foreign secretary and said: “As I walked along the beach in Indonesia I started crying.
“Even Hugh [her husband], who predicted it would all end in tears, accepted that this was the moment I was expected to run and that if I didn’t, people would say I had bottled it,” Ms Truss wrote.