1983

  • Author Taylor Downing
  • Narrator Ben Onwukwe
  • Publisher Little, Brown Book Group
  • Run Time 12 hours and 32 minutes
  • Format Audio
  • Genre Cold wars and proxy conflicts.
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What to expect

1983 was a supremely dangerous year - even more dangerous than 1962, the year of the Cuban Missile Crisis. In the US, President Reagan massively increased defence spending, described the Soviet Union as an 'evil empire' and announced his 'Star Wars' programme, calling for a shield in space to defend the US from incoming missiles.

Yuri Andropov, the paranoid Soviet leader, saw all this as signs of American aggression and convinced himself that the US really meant to attack the Soviet Union. He put the KGB on alert to look for signs of an imminent nuclear attack. When a Soviet fighter jet shot down Korean Air Lines flight KAL 007 after straying off course over a sensitive Soviet military area, President Reagan described it as a 'terrorist act' and 'a crime against humanity'. The temperature was rising fast.

Then at the height of the tension, NATO began a war game called Able Archer 83. In this exercise, NATO requested permission to use the codes to launch nuclear weapons. The nervous Soviets convinced themselves this was no exercise but the real thing.

This is an extraordinary and largely unknown Cold War story of spies and double agents, of missiles being readied, of intelligence failures, misunderstandings and the panic of world leaders. With access to hundreds of extraordinary new documents just released in the US, Taylor Downing is able to tell for the first time the gripping but true story of how near the world came to the brink of nuclear war in 1983.

1983: The World at the Brink is a real-life thriller.

Critics Review

  • Taylor Downing’s gripping and frankly terrifying book on the US-Soviet nuclear confrontation

    Tom Holland

  • A carefully researched and hugely readable account of the build-up to war, the momentum inexorably growing as he assembles each part of the jigsaw. Indeed, his narrative is so persuasive that by the time you are about two- thirds through, it takes some effort to remind yourself that the Third World War never happened

    Sunday Times

  • If you want to understand what brought about the end of the Cold War, read this book. Downing is authoritative, and his writing is vibrant and compelling . . . He brings to the page his skills and insights as a documentary film maker

    Scotsman

  • Clearly accessible to a wide audience, Downing’s authoritative and well-researched narrative charts the growth of US-Soviet antagonism from Reagan’s arrival in office in January 1981 to Able Archer. It deftly takes the reader from the White House to the skies over the Kamchatka peninsula, the streets of Beirut and the corridors of the Kremlin, where anxieties over confrontational US rhetoric were rising in the geriatric leadership of the Communist Party . . . This a remarkable story, which Downing tells in sparkling prose and in a feat of compression that many authors will envy

    BBC History

  • Downing tells this grim story with pace and flair

    Guardian

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