Abyss: The Cuban Missile Crisis 1962

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Was their objective to safeguard the Cuban revolution or to alter the balance of nuclear strike capability in their favour given the vast superiority of American weaponry at this time? And while McNamara would later live in infamy due to his role in Vietnam he was actually one of the voices of reason in 1962. After ten years as editor and then editor-in-chief of The Daily Telegraph, he became editor of the Evening Standard in 1996. Abyss provides chastening lessons on how easily things can spiral out of control but also how catastrophe can be averted. This book is a very well crafted and literate account of one of the defining and most frightening events of the twentieth century when, in October 1962, the World stood on the brink of a nuclear holocaust.

Unlike the authoritarian regimes in Russia and Cuba, America’s decision-making has been made transparent by the voluminous transcripts that have been released.The only foreign leader who demands a great deal of coverage in the narrative is British Prime Minister Harold MacMillan who comes across as an appeaser who believed in diplomacy, an approach much different from his Suez Crisis days, and held the view that England and Europe had lived for years under the threat of Russian nuclear attack and could not accept that missiles in Cuba was a menace for the United States. 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. Recordo de nos jogos haver sempre duas equipas, os nossos e os outros (uns de tronco nu, outros não). He is as shocked as are millions of us around the world, to discover that the rape of Ukraine gives this narrative a hitherto unimaginable twenty-first century immediacy. Não me lembro se havia toque, se o sinal era dado pela linha do sol que vertia pela janela virada a este.

Most of Kennedy’s own team – his national security adviser and brother Robert included – favoured this course of action. Hastings commentary on this is devastating: "In the course of the Cold War the Americans, British and other allies launched many ill-judged initiatives. He also makes frequent references to the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian War, connecting the past with the present in a way that feels unforced.

Kennedy, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, and Fidel Castro among many other important personalities are on full display. We also share information about your use of our site with our social media, advertising and analytics partners. However, publicly Kennedy could not be seen to accept the placement of Soviet missiles in Cuba so close to the US.

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. Max Hastings deploys his accustomed blend of eye-witness interviews, archive documents and diaries, White House tape recordings, top-down analysis, first to paint word-portraits of the Cold War experiences of Fidel Castro’s Cuba, Nikita Khrushchev’s Russia and Kennedy’s America; then to describe the nail-biting Thirteen Days in which Armageddon beckoned.My first reaction to the crisis of October 1962 was selfish: my Halloween was cancelled so there’d be no haul of candy.

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. I am not feeling well but do hope to continue this review soon, as I do have considerably more to say - especially concerning the reflections of Hastings (and the reflections WE OURSELVES should be making) in modern-day 2023, in respect to the very real possible outcomes of 1962.

However, the crisis highlighted a delusional individual who at times believed his own heightened rhetoric and whose actions scared Khrushchev.