Taylor Downing is a historian, writer, and television producer. He has written several best-selling books and has produced more than 200 television documentaries many of which have won awards. Taylor is currently researching and writing a new book on a little-known crisis in World War Two, due for publication in 2022.
I wrote...
1983: Reagan, Andropov, and a World on the Brink
By
Taylor Downing
What is my book about?
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. 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.
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The Books I Picked & Why
The Target Is Destroyed: What Really Happened To Flight 007 And What America Knew About It
By
Seymour M. Hersh
Why this book?
A brilliant investigation into one of the great mysteries of the Cold War - why had flight KAL007 drifted 350 miles off course into sensitive Soviet military airspace when it was shot down? Was it a genuine navigational error or could it have been a more sinister spying operation?
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Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World's Greatest Nuclear Disaster
By
Adam Higginbotham
Why this book?
Revealing how one small incident escalated into an international tragedy and how the secret Soviet state tried to cover it all up. Higginbotham opens up the mystery and gets right inside this most scary story. It could be great fiction except for the fact that it really happened.
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Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety
By
Eric Schlosser
Why this book?
An accident in an Arkansas missile silo and the minute by minute attempt to discover what had happened and to prevent a nuclear explosion. This narrative is brilliantly interwoven with the stories of accidents, mishaps, computer malfunctions and human errors that nearly led to nuclear disaster over four decades of Cold War tension.
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KGB: The Inside Story of its Foreign Operations from Lenin to Gorbachev
By
Christopher Andrew,
Oleg Gordievsky
Why this book?
A deeply revealing insight into the mysterious world of the Soviet secret service written as a collaboration between a top Cambridge historian and a senior KGB officer who was a double agent working for the British MI6. It tells us not only what the KGB got up to but, equally important, how the senior KGB leaders thought. It opens up the paranoia at the top of the Soviet system.
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A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal
By
Ben Macintyre
Why this book?
How did Kim Philby con the British establishment for so long that he was solid and reliable while passing on masses of secrets to the Soviets? This biography tells of loyalty and deception, of trust and treason to get behind one of the most enigmatic figures of the Cold War. MI6 and the CIA all believed utterly in Philby, the biggest traitor in the history of spying.