“George Washington University’s excellent National Security Archive has just published a fascinating but hair-raising new account, based on newly declassified documents, of the incident in 1979 when Zbigniew Brzezinski, then Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser, was awoken by one of those fabled 3am telephone calls and told that the Soviet Union had launched 250 nuclear missiles at the United States. America had a matter of minutes to decide whether to launch a counter-strike. Not a nice start to anyone’s day. It was, of course, a false alarm ... [But] if you want to give yourself a fright, read the archive’s new documents.”