1983 by Taylor Downing

1983 by Taylor Downing

A riveting, real-life thriller about 1983--the year tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union nearly brought the world to the point of nuclear Armageddon

The year 1983 was an extremely dangerous one--more dangerous than 1962, the year of the Cuban Missile Crisis. In the United States, President Reagan vastly increased defense spending, described the Soviet Union as an "evil empire," and launched the "Star Wars" Strategic Defense Initiative to shield the country from incoming missiles. Seeing all this, Yuri Andropov, the paranoid Soviet leader, became convinced that the US really meant to attack the Soviet Union and he put the KGB on high alert, looking for signs of an imminent nuclear attack.

When a Soviet plane shot down a Korean civilian jet, Reagan described it as "a crime against humanity." And Moscow grew increasingly concerned about America's language and behavior. Would they attack? The temperature rose fast. In November the West launched a wargame exercise, codenamed "Abel Archer," that looked to the Soviets like the real thing. With Andropov's finger inching ever closer to the nuclear button, the world was truly on the brink.

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

TAYLOR DOWNING is a television producer and writer. As managing director of Flashback Television he has produced more than 200 documentaries including many award winning history programmes. In 2008 he won the Grierson Award for Best Historical Documentary for 1983 - The Brink of Apocalypse (Channel 4 and Discovery US co-pro). He won the first ever BFI Award for Archival Achievement in 1985. Taylor is author of Churchill's War Lab (Little, Brown 2010) and Spies in the Sky (Little, Brown 2011), Cold War (1996, with Jeremy Isaacs) and Olympia (a BFI Film Classic). He regularly writes on Television History for History Today magazine and has lectured on Television History at the universities of Cambridge, Lincoln and Queen's, Belfast in the last two years. Taylor began his career at the Imperial War Museum in 1976 soon after the making of The World at War and then at Thames Television in the history unit that was set up following the huge success of The World at War.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780306921728
ISBN 10	0306921723
Title	1983
Author	Taylor Downing
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Da Capo Press
Year published	2018-04-24
Number of pages	400
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.