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Abyss: The Cuban Missile Crisis 1962

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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. 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.

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 Sir Max Hugh Macdonald Hastings, FRSL, FRHistS is a British journalist, editor, historian and author. His parents were Macdonald Hastings, a journalist and war correspondent, and Anne Scott-James, sometime editor of Harper's Bazaar. 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. 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.

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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 This is a great book. I'm giving it four-and-a-half stars: this is because IMO it is a brilliant treatment of the political and world-context aspects of the Cuban crisis, but a bit less stellar in the technical and temporal aspects of how the events of the 'Thirteen Days' unfolded. A brilliant, beautifully constructed and thrilling reassessment of the most perilous moment in history” - Daily Telegraph Meanwhile, Hastings also presents a portrait of Castro that strongly belies his popular image as a romantic revolutionary. Specifically, Castro encouraged Khrushchev to launch a preemptive nuclear strike, believing – not unlike North Korea’s Kim Jong Un – that the fate of his regime overrode all other considerations. Castro’s willingness to start an atom-splitting war – which he personally admitted long after the Crisis ended – thus provided a pretty good reason for the U.S. to insist upon putting distance between Castro and the Soviet Union’s ballistic armaments. Hastings, though, never seems to realize he is wrongfooting himself. 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.

Hastings is a British writer, and so it’s not surprising that he affords some prominence to the UK position and the thoughts and actions of Prime Minister Harold Macmillan during the crisis. Kennedy obviously felt it important to keep Britain in the loop, though the impression this book gives is that he wasn’t expecting much in the way of useful strategic advice from that quarter. The overall effect is to show how unimportant the UK was to American thinking, despite the fact that the British expected to be wiped out as a modern society if nuclear war broke out. Such is life for junior alliance partners. The opening chapters start with a description of the Bay of Pigs fiasco and continue with the risen to power of Castro, describing the love - hate relationships many Cubans felt towards the USA and the quasi-colonial actions and behaviours of the US Government and many businesses towards Cuba and its citizens. This provide fertile ground for what was to follow. This is in no way to diminish the dangerousness of the Cuban missile crisis. As Hastings shows so well in Abyss, those who have downplayed its importance – with, for example, the line of argument that neither side wanted a nuclear war, so neither would have dared make a first strike – underestimate the level to which “both sides groped through… under huge misapprehensions”. Channels of communication between Washington and Moscow were slow and unreliable, as were those between the Kremlin and the Soviet forces in Cuba. President Kennedy’s advisers were unrepentant hawks almost without exception, fed by seriously flawed intelligence. The (supposedly collective) decision-making of the presidium of the USSR’s Communist party did not dare to counter Khrushchev’s impulsive plans.I wanted to read about the Cuban missile crisis for quite some time so the release of Max Hastings' The Abyss was perfect. Hastings does a fantastic job of telling the terrifying story of the crisis using both historical archives but also eye witness testimonies. The 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis was the most perilous event in history, when mankind faced a looming nuclear collision between the United States and Soviet Union. During those weeks, the world gazed into the abyss of potential annihilation.

About the Book 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 In The Abyss, Max Hastings turns his focus to one of the most terrifying events of the mid-twentieth century—the thirteen days in October 1962 when the world stood on the brink of nuclear war. Hastings looks at the conflict with fresh eyes, focusing on the people at the heart of the crisis—America President John F. Kennedy, Soviet First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev, Cuban Prime Minister Fidel Castro, and a host of their advisors. From the #1 bestselling historian Max Hastings ‘the heart-stopping story of the missile crisis’ Daily Telegraph 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.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.

the Cuban revolution from the early days of Castro and Che Guevara to the fall of the Batista regime. 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. Many retellings of the crisis are notable for focusing on the two superpowers, with Cuba appearing as a stage setting for the main players. Rarely is Cuba’s agency integrated into the broad picture. That might be fair in terms of the power dynamics during the ‘13 days’ of the peak crisis, but the role of Cuban leader Fidel Castro is important in the prelude to and aftermath of that period. Both of those are covered, though the post–28 October period could usefully have had a deeper examination.

BookBliss

I teach a case study on the role of intelligence in this crisis as part of a course at the Australian National University, and most of the description here is familiar. But one thing I hadn’t appreciated was that the CIA’s Cuba analysts seem to have made one of the most fundamental analytical errors in mistaking the absence of evidence for evidence of absence. For example, political constraints and poor weather prevented many photo reconnaissance flights from being flown, so there was a substantial period in which developments on the ground in Cuba were not being monitored, but no alarm bells sounded in CIA assessments. 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.

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