Abyss: The Cuban Missile Crisis 1962

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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. 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. A harrowing expedition to Antarctica, recounted by Departures senior features editor Sancton, who has reported from every continent on the planet.

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.But, of course, it wasn’t and Max Hastings enthralling book tells how the world almost ended sixty years ago. A brilliant, beautifully constructed and thrilling re-assessment of the most perilous moment in history' Daily Telegraph 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. This was the first real test of the MAD concept, and indeed it stayed the hand of the warring adversaries of the Cold War. It is worth being reminded that this happened despite a belligerent and foolhardy American military, doomed to delve disastrously into Vietnam a decade later.

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

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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.” Brilliantly told... compelling... Hastings has cleverly woven the story together from all sides describing them in dramatic, almost hour by hour detail... this is a scary book. Hastings sees little evidence that today's leaders understand each other any better than they did in 1962' Sunday Times 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. 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. 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.