Abyss: The Cuban Missile Crisis 1962

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the Cuban revolution from the early days of Castro and Che Guevara to the fall of the Batista regime. Superb… reads like a thriller as the gripping drama of the Cold War power politics plays out behind closed doors in Washington, Moscow and Havana” - Daily Mail JS Tennant in his review of ABYSS in The Guardian, October 16, 2022 points out that “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.”

From the #1 bestselling historian Max Hastings ‘the heart-stopping story of the missile crisis’ Daily Telegraph

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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. What sets Hastings’ account apart from other historians is his integration of the views of everyday individuals in the United States, the Soviet Union, and Cuba. Cuban peasants, Russian workers, and American college students are all quoted as to their reactions and emotional state during the crisis. The result is a perspective that is missing from other accounts and educates the reader as to the mindset of ordinary citizens who would pay the ultimate price if the crisis had gone sideways. Fourth, in 2022, we have worldwide data and video communications of almost unlimited capacity and immediacy. 1962 was the Stone Age in this regard. No meaningful real-time communication was possible with ships at sea. Communication, such as it was, was several hours in arrears. To send a message to Moscow, the Soviet embassy in the US had to handwrite, type, encrypt, dispatch by courier on a bicycle (!!) and wait. In effect, one-way transmission of a message between Washington and Moscow averaged 12 hours elapsed. The great deficiency in communication speed profoundly affected the course of the Crisis. (Don't feel smug: it's likely that the immediacy of today's comms would be open to abuse by malevolent parties, just in different ways).

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. Probably the biggest takeaway of the book was that as in the words of McNamara the missile crisis was not actually a 'military crisis' but rather a 'political crisis'. The reason for that is because the geopolitical strategic balance had not really been modified by the placement of the missiles in Cuba. At the same time, the withdrawing of the US Jupiter missiles from Turkey would not have been any difference either because the missiles were obsolete and out of date. At the time nuclear missiles on submarines were just as dangerous and there were Soviet submarines with such missiles near the US and US submarines with such missiles near the Soviet Union yet nobody made a big fuss about it. However, publicly Kennedy could not be seen to accept the placement of Soviet missiles in Cuba so close to the US. If he would have allowed that to go on his Presidency would be compromised and he would have had no chance for a second term.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’. Castro’s demands exactly suited Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev, who was spoiling for a confrontation. Riding high on his country’s initial vaulting successes in space but secretly and painfully aware of the Soviets’ distant secondary status in the nuclear sweepstakes, Khrushchev was bristling. The Americans and their allies were refusing to bow to Russian insistence that they quit Berlin, since 1945 a divided city maintained as a knob of Western willfulness deliberately poked into East Germany. 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. the scarcely-concealed placing of nuclear weapons in Cuba and the failure of U.S. intelligence in detecting them.

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. 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. Karl Marx once said that history repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce. The balloon incident certainly qualifies as farce as far as superpower confrontations go. But it has a far more serious antecedent that, while not ending in tragedy, brought the world perilously close to a disastrous nuclear conflict. The Cuban missile crisis arose in 1962 after the Soviet Union placed medium- and intermediate-range nuclear missiles on Cuba, bringing much of the eastern seaboard of the US within range. Popular historian Max Hastings has turned his attention to those events in his latest book, Abyss: the Cuban missile crisis 1962.

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.