William B. Scott is a retired Rocky Mountain bureau chief for "Aviation Week & Space Technology" magazine and a former U.S. Air Force flight-test engineer. He served with the National Security Agency and as aircrew on nuclear sampling missions. Michael J. Coumatos is a former U.S. Navy test pilot, the former U.S. Space Command director of wargaming, and a former National Security Agency counterterrorism adviser. With the help of bestselling author William J. Birnes, these renowned experts have joined forces to grippingly depict how the first hours of World War III might play out in the year 2010.

Coumatos and Scott take the reader inside U.S. Strategic Command, where top military commanders, space-company executives, and U.S. intelligence experts are conducting a DEADSATS II wargame, exploring how the loss of critical satellites could lead to nuclear war. The gamers don't know that the war they are playing has already begun, miles above them, in the lifeless, silent cold of space. Jam-packed with the actual systems and secret technologies the United States has or will soon field to protect its assets, "Space Wars "describes a near-future nuclear nightmare that terrorists will relish but politicians prefer to ignore. In a quieter, more peaceful time, "Space Wars" would be an exciting work of fiction. But with the United States now at war, "Space Wars" is all too real.