Never in the Cold War – not even during the Cuban Missile Crisis – did the world come nearer the brink than in 1983. That was the year of Reagan’s ‘Evil Empire’ speech and his Star Wars programme, when the Soviets shot down the Korean flight KAL 007, and a NATO exercise spooked a nervous Andropov into believing war had started for real. Drawing on hundreds of recently discovered documents, this book reveals how close we came to nuclear catastrophe.