From the #1 bestselling historian Max Hastings
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.
One of its most terrifying moments came on 18 October, when President John F. Kennedy and his advisers discussed the prospect that, if US forces invaded Cuba to remove the missiles secretly deployed there, the Soviets would seize West Berlin. Robert Kennedy asked: ‘Then what do we do?’. General Maxwell Taylor, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, said: ‘Go to general war, if it’s in the interests of ours’. The President asked disbelievingly: ‘You mean nuclear exchange?’. Taylor shrugged: ‘Guess you have to’. His words highlight the madness that overtook some key players on both sides. Mercifully, JFK recoiled from the soldier’s view saying: ‘Now the question really is to what action we take which lessens the chances of a nuclear exchange, which obviously is the final failure’.
Max Hastings’s graphic and brilliant new history tells the story from the viewpoints of national leaders, Russian officers, Cuban peasants, American pilots and British disarmers. 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.
Hastings began researching this book believing that he was exploring a past event from twentieth century history. 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. We may be witnessing the onset of a new Cold War between nuclear-armed superpowers. To contend with today’s threat, which Hastings fears will prove enduring, it is critical to understand how, sixty years ago, the world survived its last glimpse into the abyss. Only by fearing the worst, he argues, can our leaders hope to secure the survival of the planet.
Max Hastings is the author of twenty-seven books, most about conflict, and between 1986 and 2002 served as editor-in-chief of the Daily Telegraph, then editor of the Evening Standard. He has won many prizes both for journalism and his books, of which the most recent are All Hell Let Loose, Catastrophe and The Secret War, best-sellers translated around the world. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, an Honorary Fellow of King’s College, London and was knighted in 2002. He has two grown-up children, Charlotte and Harry, and lives with his wife Penny in West Berkshire, where they garden enthusiastically.
- PRAISE FOR MAX HASTINGS’S BESTSELLING HISTORY VIETNAM
- ‘Masterpiece … manages with great skill to combine the accumulation of strategic and political disaster with the real experience of those fighting on the ground’ Antony Beevor, Spectator
- ‘Will surely set the benchmark for years to come… This may be his best … Exhaustively researched and superbly written, it is both a balanced account of how and why the war unfolded as it did, and a gripping narrative on what it was like to take part…History as it should be: objective, immersive and compelling’ Daily Telegraph, 5*
- ‘Magnificent… One by one, the sacred canons of right and left are obliterated. The war is laid bare, with all its uncomfortable truths exposed’ The Times
- ‘Powerful and chilling… Hastings is masterful at describing the conditions faced by young American soldiers… [he] is second to none in his ability to describe military strategy with a clarity that makes things entirely understandable to the layman’ Mail on Sunday, 5*
- ‘An altogether magnificent historical narrative’ Tim O’Brien
- ‘A masterpiece’ Frank Scotton
- ‘Magnificent, his best work … full of extraordinary and compelling detail and thoroughly informed by his own personal experience of so much of the war. It’s written in unputdownable style, with a dispassionate, liberal-minded understanding of the detail of the war, which draws on testimony from every side and doesn’t favour anyone. I’ve never read a better history of the wars in Vietnam, and it’s hard to see how anyone will be able to improve on this’ John Simpson
- ‘Neophytes and experts alike will find Hastings’s book stimulating, informative – and above all, riveting’ New Statesman
- ‘This fabulous work offers up a gut-wrenching glimpse of the reality of war’ The Sun, 5*
- ‘Impressive… A fast-paced, poignant and eye-opening read’ Literary Review
