The view that the 1983 Able Archer NATO exercises were very closing in causing a USSR-NATO nuclear war has been widely known for sometime now but a February 2021 report by the National Security Archive seems to confirm that it was more dangerous than we initially believed. However, Simon Miles, a Duke University professor says that the claims that the scares of the 1983 Able Archer exercises was only "mythical" and argues it was not as dangerous as it is often claimed to be. So was he right in that Able Archer was heavily sensationalised or it was truly a legitimate possibility of nuclear war on par with the Cuban Missile Crisis ?
Previously, there have been several good answers on Able Archer here and here by /u/restricteddata that conform with my general understanding of the incident and another fairly recent one by /u/yourusernamemustbeb that falls much more in line with the new scholarship that Miles has brought to the table.
I'm not current enough on the debate here to add too much more - I actually just picked up the Miles book last week, since it's one that I've meant to read for a while and of all things the introduction of KAL 007 into For All Mankind's alternate timeline finally prompted me to buy it - but the one thing that I think is still pretty well supported regardless of the more recent scholarship is that the after-incident reviews did have a meaningful effect on Reagan's thought process about just how much he wanted to escalate things. While the perception of the risk involved may indeed have been out of whack with what was actually going on, it's pretty hard to argue that rightly or wrongly, the principals of US foreign policy didn't incorporate that assessment into their strategy afterwards.