This book took my back to the 80s and the height of the Cold War. It was well written and I would recommend it to anyone who loves history, and also anyone who grew up in the 80s and remember the beginning of th end of the Soviet Union.

A scarier than fiction account of misstatements and misunderstandings that almost led to a nuclear confrontation between the US and the USSR in 1983. Thoroughly researched and well written this book shows how easy it is for political rhetoric to become a world-wide catastrophe. A lesson that should be well-learned in our current times.

I loved this book. My wish is that books like this will make people pay attention to what is going on right now. I remember being on the ground in Europe during this time with the military and how for the first time we could see the "edge" and yet America seemed uninterested; now after this I think maybe they didn't know. Read and learn.

Great synopsis of the Cold War and one specific incident that helped shape response and perception. Very good read!

First of all, this was a terrific book. It is interesting to revisit US/Russian relations in our not too distant past in light of the present state of affairs and this book does a wonderful job describing US/Russian relations in what proved to be the near end of the Cold War (early 1980s). The subject is ostensibly the nearly disastrous response by the Soviets to a joint US/NATO exercise but the book goes far beyond that to take an all-encompassing look at US/Soviet relations and the things going on in (like nuclear war planning and continuity of government planning) and between (such as espionage) the two nations.

This book is an excellent telling of the end of the cold war and one of the near nuclear conflicts that occurred. Having grown up in the 1980s, much of this book filled in the truth of the time that I was not aware. The fear of the Soviet Union I understood well. The Soviet fear of the United States surprised me. I had never thought of my country as a threat to another.

The author does a great job of outlining the problems of Mutually Assured Destruction diplomacy. He explains the efforts that President Reagan had to goto to engage the Soviets directly. The complete lack of trust that the State Department had for the Soviets and the President surprised me. I never realized the difficulty of implementing a new approach by a president. The bureaucracy does run the town.

This is slightly better than a similar book "1983" which deals with the same time in history.

This topic has not had enough coverage until now. This should scare anyone to know how close to the brink we really can come. Well researched and written. This should be on the best seller lists this summer.

Beware the book whose narrative begins only after miles of preliminary material. The coverage of this book lacked the internal tension that I was expecting and was focused on such a narrow time frame that I became lost in the details. I began to skim, ultimately not finishing this one.

What an excellent book! I picked it up knowing very little about the nuclear war scare in 1983, and after finishing the book I feel very well versed about the situation. It is very well-written and easy to understand for someone who had little prior knowledge. I do believe that a person with any level of information about this event would really enjoy reading this book. Well done.