Abyss: The Cuban Missile Crisis 1962

Product Information

Superb... reads like a thriller as the gripping drama of the Cold War power politics plays out behind closed doors in Washington, Moscow and Havana' Daily Mail The Cuban Missile Crisis . . . easily could have escalated to nuclear war. . . . notable historian Hastings provides a narrative more coherent than would have been experienced by the principals, emphasizing how limited information could have led to disaster, such as when the USSR's Nikita Khrushchev proposed to base nuclear missiles in Cuba as his military assured could be done secretly and without provoking the U.S. . . . Replete with astute characterizations of participants in the crisis, Hastings' able account registers the peril humanity then faced and still faces in a world of competitive, nuclear-armed countries. — Booklist From the #1 bestselling historian Max Hastings ‘the heart-stopping story of the missile crisis’ Daily Telegraph THAT was some stuff. And that was just before Vietnam. Hastings, a masterful British military historian, researched this during the COVID pandemic and published just after Russia invaded Ukraine, leading him to useful comparisons of then and now, of Kruschev and Putin.

JS Tennant in his review of ABYSS in The Guardian, October 16, 2022 points out that “In January this year, Russia’s deputy foreign minister threatened to deploy “military assets” to Cuba if the US continued to support Ukrainian sovereignty. As has become all too apparent in the past weeks, tactical nuclear missiles are still a threat, along with chemical weapons and supersonic missiles. It’s as if Russia’s desperate scramble to maintain influence will stop at nothing and, as Hastings points out, ‘the scope for a catastrophic miscalculation is as great now as it was in 1914 Europe or in the 1962 Caribbean.’ Abyss provides chastening lessons on how easily things can spiral out of control but also how catastrophe can be averted.” Hastings sets the scene for the crisis by starting with the story of Castro and the Cuban revolution and of course the Bay of Pigs disaster. He then moves to describe the political and social situation in both the US and the Soviet Union and also briefly goes over the biography of Khrushchev and Kennedy.Our planet best hope to survive the 21st century relies upon an imperative that no one national leader shows themselves deficient in the fear which must lie at the heart of wisdom and which was indispensable to a peaceful resolution of cuban missile crisis"

What sets Hastings’ account apart from other historians is his integration of the views of everyday individuals in the United States, the Soviet Union, and Cuba. Cuban peasants, Russian workers, and American college students are all quoted as to their reactions and emotional state during the crisis. The result is a perspective that is missing from other accounts and educates the reader as to the mindset of ordinary citizens who would pay the ultimate price if the crisis had gone sideways.It’s not the primary source research, for there are no new revelations that have not been published elsewhere. And it’s not the ultimate judgments, for Hastings’s conclusions – that Khrushchev acted precipitously, that the American military establishment verged on the insane, and that President Kennedy handled the situation quite well – are fairly standard. Hastings recounts the history of the crisis from the viewpoints of national leaders, Soviet officers, Cuban peasants, American pilots and British peacemakers. Hastings, success as an author has always rested upon eyewitness interviews, archival work, tape recordings, and insightful analysis – his current work is no exception. The positions, comments, and actions of President John F. Kennedy, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, and Fidel Castro among many other important personalities are on full display. An extraordinary new account of the Cuban Missile Crisis and how it created some of the most dangerous, unstable years in world history – from the number one bestselling historian Max Hastings. It also reinforces one of the chief tenets of the Crisis: that much of it was driven by domestic politics. The placement of the Cuban missiles did not drastically change the strategic picture for the United States, yet Kennedy could not let them remain and still hope to be president. Likewise, Khrushchev could not simply remove them without humiliating his regime and weakening his own position. As for Fidel Castro, he ably used anti-American sentiment to fan his people’s revolutionary spirit, and to distract them from his failed economic policies. It is hard for many of us to imagine, 60 years on from the Cuban missile crisis, the atmosphere of a time in which many assumed all-out war between the superpowers was coming and that such a clash would necessarily be nuclear. But as the journalist and historian Max Hastings reminds us in Abyss, relations between China, Russia and the US are as fractious now as ever. Levels of mutual understanding, and the will to accommodate new understandings, are hardly better than in 1962; the scope for an irreversible error – even a deliberate act – remains.

Nearing eighty, Hastings still writes with the pungent style that suffused his earlier books. At one point, for instance, he refers to Ernest Hemingway as “the big bullshitter with the mustache.” He also makes frequent references to the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian War, connecting the past with the present in a way that feels unforced. Of course, much of the action takes place in the White House, where the so-called Executive Committee met to discuss options, all while being secretly recorded. Unlike the authoritarian regimes in Russia and Cuba, America’s decision-making has been made transparent by the voluminous transcripts that have been released. I appreciated that Hastings took this into account when forming his verdicts, noting that the imperfect logic employed in the U.S. was probably no worse – and likely far better – than that which took place in the Soviet Union. This is a new history for a new generation, putting fresh, international context on an astonishing military and political showdown. In those throes of the Cold War, hundreds of millions of people around the world were, for some days, terrified that a nuclear holocaust was imminent. Bringing together the threads of American bellicosity and Soviet brinksmanship, it becomes clear that while both sides eventually stepped away from destruction, that does not mean disaster was not terrifyingly close. After ten years as editor and then editor-in-chief of The Daily Telegraph, he became editor of the Evening Standard in 1996. He has won many awards for his journalism, including Journalist of The Year and What the Papers Say Reporter of the Year for his work in the South Atlantic in 1982, and Editor of the Year in 1988. A brilliant, beautifully constructed and thrilling reassessment of the most perilous moment in history” - Daily TelegraphAnother is the cultural and national assumptions that all those involved brought to the table. Hastings points out that, "In the eyes of all save Americans, a piece is missing from both the fevered October 1962 discussions in Washington and most histories published since. US leaders took it for granted that their country could not be expected to endure the presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba. It was undoubtedly the case that domestic opinion regarded the deployment as representing as much a mortal insult as a deadly peril. But, echoing Harold Macmillan's courteous observation to JFK, there was no more logical or legal cause why the Cubans should not choose to host nuclear weapons on their soil than that the Turks, Italians or British should be denied such a right. European NATO members had lived for years with a proximate Soviet atomic threat. The American debate was conducted by men wearing historical blinkers - sharing the assumption that the United States had privileges in determining what was, and was not, acceptable in Cuba such as were a commonplace to President Theodore Roosevelt, but represented an anachronism in 1962." The US took its imperialism for granted, much as the Soviet Union assumed that America was weak and decadent. Hastings comments elsewhere that Kennedy's reality was not Khruschev's reality, that they did not see the world in the same way and could not assume that the other would react in the same way to events as they would themselves. That is good advice in personal interactions, never mind in international affairs, and it is remarkable that it was not applied more thoughtfully during the Crisis. JFK had ample opportunity to resort to military action, but staid his hand despite pressure from members of the Joint Chiefs and others. The president was the driver of debate and became more of an “analyst-in-chief.” He pressed his colleagues to probe the implications of any actions the United States would take and offer reasonable solutions to end the crisis. For JFK it seemed as if he was in a chess match with Khrushchev countering each of his moves and trying to offer him a way out of the crisis he precipitated. Obviously – as we do not yet inhabit a world of radioactive ash – the missiles of October never flew. Still, the margins were so thin, and the human element so pronounced, that it is unsurprising that this event has been the subject of numerous, sometimes excellent books.