In my last year at school, in 1983–1984, the United States and the USSR teetered on the brink of a nuclear confrontation after both misread the intent of a series of respective military exercises. As I later learned from declassified archives during my work in the U.S. National Intelligence Council, the 1983 “war scare” was real. But even without any formal validation, the international tension was palpable. Popular culture in the UK and Europe, as well as in the United States, was filled with rock songs like Nena’s “99 Red Balloons,” about the beginning of a missile strike in a divided
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