The Brink

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.

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.

Silencing the Bomb

In December 2016, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists moved their iconic "Doomsday Clock" thirty seconds forward to two and a half minutes to midnight, the latest it has been set since 1952, the year of the first United States hydrogen bomb test. But a group of scientists—geologists, engineers, and physicists—has been fighting to turn back the clock. Since the dawn of the Cold War, they have advocated a halt to nuclear testing, their work culminating in the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which still awaits ratification from China, Iran, North Korea—and the United States. The backbone of the treaty is every nation's ability to independently monitor the nuclear activity of the others. The noted seismologist Lynn R. Sykes, one of the central figures in the development of the science and technology used in monitoring, has dedicated his career to halting nuclear testing. In Silencing the Bomb, he tells the inside story behind scientists' quest for disarmament.

Called upon time and again to testify before Congress and to inform the public, Sykes and his colleagues were, for much of the Cold War, among the only people on earth able to say with certainty when and where a bomb was tested and how large it was. Methods of measuring earthquakes, researchers realized, could also detect underground nuclear explosions. When politicians on both sides of the Iron Curtain attempted to sidestep disarmament or test ban treaties, Sykes was able to deploy the nascent science of plate tectonics to reveal the truth. Seismologists' discoveries helped bring about treaties limiting nuclear testing, but it was their activism that played a key role in the quest for peace. Full of intrigue, international politics, and hard science used for the global good, Silencing the Bomb is a timely and necessary chronicle of one scientist's efforts to keep the clock from striking midnight.

This book is an excellent insiders tale of nuclear testing and limiting.  The author explains the science behind verification clearly.  This is scientific history at its best.  Dr. Sykes played a central role in the limiting of nuclear testing and the ability to verify the following of the treaties agreed to.  As a geoscientist of off earth phenomena, I found the book fascinating.  Having worked in missile defense for decades, I am familiar with the results of some of his work.  He reaches conclusions regarding arms limitation treaties that are different than I, but I see the current world differently than he does.  Dr. Sykes still views the world as a primarily bilateral nuclear threat.  I see the world where the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty has become of limited importance.  Where clandestine nuclear weapons are shared at will with numerous countries.  Dr. Sykes does make a point of covering the numerous missed opportunities that we have had to limit nuclear proliferation that were missed.