Sir Hugo Drax is celebrated as a patriotic industrialist funding the Moonraker, a new British rocket intended to strengthen national defence. When M suspects that Drax is cheating at cards, Bond is asked to expose him discreetly. A death at the rocket establishment then gives 007 a reason to enter the project itself, where Special Branch officer Gala Brand is already working undercover.
Bond discovers that Drax’s public identity conceals a wartime past and a plan to turn Britain’s own prestige weapon against London with a nuclear warhead. The conspiracy is fictional, but Fleming builds it from genuine post-war anxieties about missile technology, nuclear weapons, hidden wartime loyalties and Britain’s attempt to remain a major power in the early Cold War.
