The most recommended books about the Cold War

This very short book came out in 1979, and it had quite an impact on me. It showed how writing about Japanese history and culture could not only be entertaining and fascinating, but extremely useful. The book focuses on how guns were imported into Japan in 1543 and spread widely, but were then largely abandoned. At a time during the Cold War, when nuclear weapons seemed to be proliferating endlessly, it also hinted at a different future, where what seemed so inevitable, might not be so.  

I was out of breath when I finished this.

This book hops between locales brilliantly, and following Knox through the claustrophobic maze of Kowloon walled city of was fantastic. The highlight for me - if you can call it that - was a certain scene in a grain silo - the stuff of nightmares.

Somehow, these books manage to improve each time, which is no mean feat when the first was my favorite spy novel in years. But mostly, I’m excited that this trilogy, as it stands so far, looks poised to be a springboard into a new world with a deadlier foe. I really hope we’ll see more!

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?

A Full-Value Ruble is economic history at its best. Using Soviet archival materials for both the Stalin and Khrushchev periods, Kristy Ironside shows how indispensable money was to an economy that, for ideological reasons, aimed at abolishing it. But a strong ruble (and not just any currency) did not mean that the underlying economy was strong. Using money as a lens, the author provides the reader with a multi-faceted view of Soviet urban and rural daily life in peace, war, and reconstruction.

The decade between the end of the Cold War and the beginning of the Global War of Terrorism was a decade of uncertainty for the U.S. intelligence community and an important part of intelligence history. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the reduction in national security budgets raised numerous questions about the purpose, focus, and funding of intelligence organizations during the 1990s. Loch Johnson’s book is an excellent and essential read to understand this period. One of the foremost intelligence scholars, Johnson also served on the Aspin-Brown Commission that considered the future of U.S. intelligence after the Cold War (he also previously served on the 1975 Church and Pike Commission). A commission covered extensively in this book.

The sins and tragedies of the Cold War are resurrected in Le Carré’s late-career novel, A Legacy of Spies.

After retiring from MI6, Peter Guillam is summoned back to London by his former bosses, intent on clearing up a botched spy operation first described in The Spy Who Came in From the Cold. 

A Legacy of Spies shows that a story revolving around bureaucratic turf wars and incriminating paper trails can be just as suspenseful as any of James Bond’s implausible high-tech adventures.

George Smiley, among the 20th century’s most compelling fictional characters, makes a guest appearance, drawing us back into the Cold War’s darkest days, when men and women served as pawns in a geopolitical power game—and often paid the price for their role in these international dramas. 

Sometimes I’m looking for a book that contains it all—history, geology, nature, culture, and adventure, and this one comes very close to succeeding. It’s a dense book, filled with facts, but readable nonetheless. It also does what many accounts fail to do, which is to personalize the historical events by bringing to life the characters involved. It works as both a sit-down narrative and a reference volume for the library.

An edited collection, Latin America and the Global Cold War actually does what the field of Cold War studies has talked about for decades—decentering the Cold War. Breaking with the long-standing idea that Latin America was merely the backyard of U.S. imperialism, the 14 contributions show how deeply Latin American countries were connected to other parts of the Global South. Bringing together junior and senior scholars from three continents, the volume is a refreshing and a much-needed eye-opener for all historians of international relations.

I discovered espionage novels during lockdown, maybe to lose myself in a different type of uncertain world. I blasted through the greats, but absolutely loved discovering the contemporary authors writing such stories about new global issues.

There’s something special about Mick Herron’s Slough House series, but do check out Matthew’s The Scarlet Papers. I found it to be an epic tale that spans the last 75 years and numerous historical touchstones. It was an education for me, but more importantly, it was a read I couldn’t put down.

In the 1940s, journalist John Hersey wrote an eye-opening expose on the effects of the atomic bombing of Japan with Hiroshima. In doing so, Hersey began to shape the already-contested memory of why America dropped “the bomb.” Following in Hersey’s footsteps, in the early 1980s Jonathan Schell penned a straightforward warning about the atomic age. After interviewing scientists, policymakers, and intellectuals, he began to pen an accessible essay exposing of what would happen to earth after a nuclear war. The result was Fate of the Earth, and it went on to become one of the most impactful pieces of non-fiction of the decade. It helped to validate scientist Carl Sagan’s controversial “nuclear winter” hypothesis, and inspired an untold number of the public to engage in antinuclear activism. To appreciate the early 1980s as a period of intense nuclear fear, this is a must-read.