I'm a little curious as to why the fascination always seems to be with the Cold War going hot, when in OTL, the pressures were always to avoid that.
It's not as though there is a shortage of areas where proxy wars took place/could have taken place, and it's not as though there isn't plenty of mileage in that classic of fiction, the spy thriller (be it well written or otherwise). I'd have thought that one of the lessons we can draw from incidents such as Cuba or Able Archer is that you have to work hard to get WW3 kicked off, because all the pressures tend to work to keep it under control. The build-up in fiction often takes the form: "Side A does this, Side B responds thus, and whoops, never mind." You rarely get to see the efforts both sides put in to finding out what the hell's actually going on, or trying to find ways of bringing things under control, or indeed, doing any of the things that could prevent the Hot War.
But no, as soon as the words "Cold War" are uttered, you may as well start revving up the tank engines in the Fulda Gap.