Abyss: The Cuban Missile Crisis 1962

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The 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis is widely considered to be the closest the world has come to a full nuclear exchange. In a ploy apparently meant to taunt the United States, Soviet Premier Nikita Khruschev sent medium and intermediate range ballistic missiles to the Caribbean nation, along with enough atomic warheads to devastate America’s eastern seaboard. 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. Once those missiles were discovered by U2 overflights, President John F. Kennedy came under intense pressure from the military establishment – especially a barely-hinged Curtis Lemay, head of the Strategic Air Command – to destroy the missiles by airstrike, followed by an invasion. Indeed, the desire of the armed forces for swift action led them to make the kind of impossible guarantees typically reserved for salesmen of used automobiles.

Among his bestselling books Bomber Command won the Somerset Maugham Prize, and both Overlord and The Battle for the Falklands won the Yorkshire Post Book of the Year Prize.

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A harrowing expedition to Antarctica, recounted by Departures senior features editor Sancton, who has reported from every continent on the planet. From the #1 bestselling historian Max Hastings 'the heart-stopping story of the missile crisis' Daily Telegraph Occasionally, Hastings leaves the world leaders behind completely, to give us anecdotes from average individuals living through the Crisis, powerless observers in a high-stakes game they never joined. The sheer number of viewpoints presented adds richness and depth to the proceedings. 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. 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

A brilliant, beautifully constructed and thrilling reassessment of the most perilous moment in history” - Daily Telegraph 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. The Telegraph values your comments but kindly requests all posts are on topic, constructive and respectful. Please review our

Summary

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. 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 Hastings corrects a number of myths associated with the crisis. One of the most famous was the idea that on October 24, 1962, as Soviet ships approached the quarantine line the White House held its breath as to whether they could stay the course. In reality no merchant ship carrying weapons or troops approached anywhere near the invisible line. Soviet ships had reversed course the previous day, only one of which was closer than 500 miles. This was due in large part because of the weakness American naval communications. Another area that historians have overlooked was events in the Atlantic Ocean – particularly concerning were four Soviet submarines, one carrying a nuclear warhead. Hastings explores this aspect of the crisis, and the reader can only cringe as to what Washington did not know and the slow communication process that existed throughout the crisis.

Hastings was educated at Charterhouse School and University College, Oxford, which he left after a year.After leaving Oxford University, Max Hastings became a foreign correspondent, and reported from more than sixty countries and eleven wars for BBC TV and the London Evening Standard. The heart-stopping story of the missile crisis has been told many times before, but never with the narrative verve and panache that is Hastings’s hallmark. He has uncovered many new American, Russian, British and particularly Cuban sources that enable him to set the crisis in the context of its “times, personalities and the wider world”. It is also timely because, as a consequence of Russia’s recent invasion of Ukraine, we may be entering a new Cold War in which the threat of a nuclear war is once again very real. “The scope for a catastrophic miscalculation,” writes Hastings, “is as great now as it was in 1914 Europe or in the 1962 Caribbean.” The book raises some profound questions. Did the placing of strategic nuclear missiles on Cuba a few miles from the American mainland really alter the balance of power in the Western Hemisphere? Europe had been living with a Soviet led Armageddon on its doorstep for years and in any event, submarines equipped with nuclear missiles parked in the Atlantic would offer an even greater, less easily detectable threat than Cuba. Also, the stark contrast between the enormous destructive power of the weaponry involved and the frighteningly slow and primitive means of communication available to the Americans and the Soviets.I was seven and living in San Diego when nasty Nikita Khrushchev put his missiles in Cuba. My first reaction to the crisis of October 1962 was selfish: my Halloween was cancelled so there’d be no haul of candy. As an American, I was already steeped in the comfortable certainties of exceptionalism — my country was virtuous, Russia evil. Those simple truths would long colour my interpretation of what happened in Cuba. Even when I began to question that rigid dichotomy, I still took solace in the belief that deterrence had worked. I trusted that the horrific nature of nuclear weapons would prevent their use. Max Hastings excellent book on the Cuban Missile Crisis is terrifying, not least because of its contemporary relevance as relations between Russia and the West enter a new, colder phase. The events that unfolded in late 1962 as the USA realised that the Soviet Union had deployed nuclear weapons in Cuba and sought to secure their removal are quite possibly the closest humanity has ever come to self-extinction. Hastings journalistic instinct for storytelling serves to capture the drama of those frantic days, and his understanding of the principal actors involved on all sides, and of their motivations, add a further depth of insight. All told, this is a first-rate piece of popular narrative history. Kennedy had many, by now, well known and copiously documented faults.His willingness however, to refrain from the lethal and precipitate action pressed so hard upon him by his military advisors while he pursued a diplomatic solution, I believe, represents his ‘finest hour’. It is a strange paradox that so many of the men who performed so well during this crisis exercising cool nerves and sound judgement such as McNamara, Rusk, Bundy etc would be abandon such qualities and have their reputations destroyed and swallowed up by the quagmire of the Vietnam war just a few short years later.

I’d read Max Hastings’ highly accessible books based on World War 2 and appreciate his broad coverage from political and military leaders to the accounts from the trenches. Bestselling author Max Hastings offers a welcome re-evaluation of one of the most gripping and tense international events in modern history—the Cuban Missile Crisis—providing a people-focused narrative that explores the attitudes and conduct of Russians, Cubans, Americans, and a terrified world that followed each moment as it unfolded.A Times History Book of the Year 2022 From the #1 bestselling historian Max Hastings 'the heart-stopping story of the missile crisis' Daily Telegraph