Sources

I don't think I know anything that anybody else doesn't know. In fact, I daresay I'm slightly more ignorant than the average man, if you can even imagine. Still, here are some books I've referred to in my putterings through the Cold War, in absolutely no particular order.

Scott, Harriet Fast, and William F. Scott. The Armed Forces of the USSR. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1979
This is more an overview of the Soviet political-military complex as it was understood by the West during the wind-down of detente at the end of the 1970s. There's little of interest to the wargamer, I feel, but it has much to offer someone wondering how we saw the Soviet military and political structures at the dawn of the 1980s.

Cockburn, Andrew. The Threat: Inside the Soviet Military Machine. New York, NY: Random House, 1983 
Cockburn goes into much detail on the abysmal conditions Soviet conscripts lived in while they furthered the glorious cause of world socialism, but in his zeal to oppose the arms race and topple the immense edifice of the Soviet threat to western civilization that so exercised minds and budgets in the 1980s, he often shoots himself in the foot. 

Watson, Graham E., and Richard A. Rinaldi. The British Army in Germany (BAOR and After): An Organizational History, 1947-2004. [Takoma Park, MD?]: Tiger Lily Publications for Orbat.com, 2005
Pretty well indispensable if you're weirdly anal like me and want to know exactly which British regiments and battalions you're representing on the tabletop at any given point in the Cold War.

Grau, Lester W., and Michael A. Gress. The Soviet-Afghan War: How a Superpower Fought and Lost. Lawrence, Kan.: University of Kansas, 2002

Hooker, Mark T. The Military Uses of Literature: Fiction and the Armed Forces in the Soviet Union. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1996
I found this fascinating. Have you ever wondered if the Russians had a New Socialist Man who was to Tom Clancy what the Su-24 was to the F-111? Wonder no more. A nifty whistlestop tour through Soviet fiction about their armed forces, from immediately after the war, all the way through Afghanistan and the dissolution of the Union. It's cheap if you get it used.

Taylor, Bill. Royal Air Force Germany since 1945. Hinckley: Midland, 2003

Laber, Thomas. British Army Of The Rhine. Armoured Vehicles On Exercise. Hong Kong: Concord Publ., 1991

Odom, William E. The Collapse of the Soviet Military. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1998. 
An incisive book by the former director of the NSA, this pretty much cemented my belief that any sort of viable Cold War gone hot scenario was impossible after 1985.

Edmonds, Robin. Soviet Foreign Policy--the Brezhnev Years. Oxford [Oxfordshire]: Oxford UP, 1983.
Edmonds was a British diplomat, and he was clearly not terribly keen on Europe's foreign policy being tied to that of the USA. He also makes the interesting point that most Soviet exports to client states were military because the Soviet economy failed to produce other export goods of any value. Obviously, this could only serve to increase tension with the West.