While the Cuban Missile Crisis is remembered as a period when Cold War tension peaked, the world came nearer to destruction in 1983 – the year of Reagan’s ‘Evil Empire’ speech and Star Wars programme, when the Soviets shot down the Korean flight KAL 007, and a NATO exercise unnerved Andropov into believing war had started for real. Drawing on hundreds of recently discovered documents, this book reveals how genuine the threat of nuclear catastrophe became.