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.
Until recently, the disturbing truth about what actually happened 60 years ago has been hidden in often inaccessible academic studies, leaving the public to shelter in cozy ignorance. Enter Hastings, a rock of probity and good sense. He’s combined his investigative skills with his flair for storytelling to produce the most gripping narrative of the crisis I’ve yet encountered. His story unfolds, as it should, as a frightening but hopelessly addictive narrative of 13 nerve-wracking days when the world teetered above an abyss ... While Hastings accepts that Kennedy’s provocations of Castro and Khrushchev helped to bring this crisis into being, he also acknowledges his brilliance at solving it ... Hastings writes with great confidence and wisdom about events he lived through. As he demonstrates, age and experience are great advantages when writing history. As we grow older, we collect more material and become more astute at analysing it. Supremely self-assured, Hastings writes as he pleases, occasionally straying from his path to follow whims — things he just happens to find interesting. Judgments are delivered adroitly, not with a sledgehammer.
Hastings lays bare, with chilling clarity, the ease with which political theatre and bluster could well have escalated into a scenario of mutually assured destruction ... 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' ... provides chastening lessons on how easily things can spiral out of control but also how catastrophe can be averted.
... 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. This was wrong on both counts. Once the crisis broke, the Americans, led by President John Kennedy, groped to discern the intent of Khrushchev’s gambit, which, as Hastings notes, was not even clear to the Soviet leader himself. When exposed by Kennedy’s October 22 revelation of the Soviet missiles, Khrushchev immediately began a week-long retreat, during which Kennedy was under immense pressure to invade Cuba. 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.
