If you want to be scared silly I can recommend "One Minute to Midnight" by Michael Dobbs - it goes through the Cuban Missile crisis minute by minute with a lot of detail. The number of things that went wrong that almost led to war are remarkable - e.g. who would have thought that the Northern Lights could have helped start a nuclear war.... It also covers the story of the submarine fleet that Vasili Arkhipov was on and why they were a bit tetchy when the US Navy started annoying them.