The brink

The book “The brink” is an absorbing account of the tense relations between the United States and the Soviet Union during Ronald Reagan’s first presidential term. It begins with describing NATO five-day military exercise codenamed Able Archer in 1983. In simulating a Warsaw Pact invasion of Western Europe and a NATO nuclear response, Able Archer scared the Soviet Union into believing that an actual U.S.–led attack was imminent. Thus the Russians readied their nuclear forces and placed military units in Eastern Europe on alert, bringing the two superpowers to the edge of war. The author chronicles the road to this near catastrophe in vivid details that are often scary and reflect the profound concerns of the nuclear age. In relating incidents such as Reagan’s “evil empire” speech, the Soviet Union’s shooting down Korean Air Lines Flight 007 and the installation of Pershing II missiles in Western Europe the book skillfully places the Able Archer exercise within the context of the fraught Cold War atmosphere of the early 1980s. The author thinks that key to the easing of this tension was Reagan’s belated understanding that Russian distrust was rooted in the fact that, as the president noted in his diary, “many people at the top of the Soviet hierarchy were genuinely afraid of America and Americans.” The author has based the book on interviews with government officials and spies who were on the scene. Yet he compromises the narrative with short chapters that bounce from place to place and a frustrating tendency to omit dates. The book is full of extensive cast of characters and many details that could have been easily omitted without breaking the rhythm of the book. The book is very informative in its content but it requires a lot of attention to fully understand its content. TW