The Brink; President Reagan and the Nuclear War Scare of 1983
Seng Vongphrachanh (author photograph) New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018. First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. xx, 364 pages. Illustrations. Author's Note on Sources and Quotations. Major Acronyms and Programs. Sources. Select Bibliography. Notes. Index. Minor DJ wear and soiling. Some page discoloration. Marc Ambinder (born c. 1978) is an American university professor, journalist, and television producer. He is a former politics editor at The Atlantic, a White House Correspondent for National Journal, contributing editor for GQ, and was editor-at-large of The Week and a member of the USA Today national board of contributors. In 2017, he was the journalist-in-residence at the University of Pennsylvania School of Law. His third book, The Brink: President Reagan and the Nuclear War Scare of 1983, was published 2018. He teaches at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, where he leads Annneberg's digital security initiative. He has written for The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Washington Post, Vice, and numerous national magazines. He has been a consulting producer and on-air expert for documentaries about special operations forces, the Secret Service and government doomsday plans. He has been a guest on every national television news network in the U.S., on the BBC, and was a regular analyst on politics for CBS News Radio. His journalism has won him several awards. He was nominated for an Emmy in 2005 and was part of a team that won a DuPont Silver Baton from Columbia University. The incredible story of the 1983 war game that triggered a tense, brittle period of nuclear brinkmanship between the United States and the former Soviet Union. What happened in 1983 to make the Soviet Union so afraid of a potential nuclear strike from the United States that they sent mobile ICBMs (intercontinental ballistic missiles) into the field, placing them on a three-minute alert? Marc Ambinder explains the anxious period between the United States and the Soviet Union from 1982 to 1984, with the Able Archer 83 war game as the fulcrum of the tension. With astonishing and clarifying new details, he recounts the scary series of the close encounters that tested the limits of ordinary humans and powerful leaders alike. Ambinder explains how political leadership ultimately triumphed over misunderstandings, helping the two countries maintain a fragile peace. Ambinder provides a comprehensive and chilling account of the nuclear command and control process, from intelligence warnings to the composition of the nuclear codes themselves. And he affords glimpses into the secret world of a preemptive electronic attack that scared the Soviet Union into action. Ambinder's account reads like a thriller, recounting the spy-versus-spy games that kept both countries, and the world, in check. From geopolitics in Moscow and Washington, to sweat-caked soldiers fighting in the trenches of the Cold War, to high-stakes war games across NATO and the Warsaw Pact, The Brink serves as the definitive intelligence, nuclear, and national security history of one of the most precarious times in recent memory. Condition: Very good / Very good.
Keywords: Nuclear Weapons, War Games, Able Archer 83, Command and Control, NATO, Warsaw Pact, Decapitation Strategy, First-Strike Capability, ICBM, Crisis Management, Ronald Reagan, Gorbachev, Lee Trolan
ISBN: 9781476760377
[Book #84480]
Price: $45.00