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Abyss by Max Hastings: a superb account of the Cuban Missile Crisis – and a stark warning for today

Abyss by Max Hastings review, the Cuban Missile Crisis - AFP/Getty Images
Abyss by Max Hastings review, the Cuban Missile Crisis - AFP/Getty Images

During the morning of October 16, 1962, National Security Advisor Mac Bundy entered the president’s bedroom in the White House and found John F Kennedy still in his pyjamas, while his children watched TV. Bundy had sensational news to impart: the CIA had “hard photographic evidence” that the Soviet Union had secretly placed long-range nuclear weapons on Cuba, just 90 miles from the US mainland.

“We’re probably going to have to bomb them,” said Kennedy.

His brother Robert, US attorney general, was no less shocked by the news. “Oh s---! S---! S---!’ he exclaimed. “Those sons-of-bitches Russians.”

For much of the next 13 days, the world teetered on the brink of nuclear catastrophe as Kennedy and his advisors tried to force the Soviets, led by Stalin’s successor as Chairman of the Presidium, Nikita Khruschev, to withdraw the missiles. Kennedy’s military chiefs, and not a few of his civilian advisors, saw an opportunity to topple Cuban’s communist leader Fidel Castro by invading the Caribbean island or, at the very least, destroying its military infrastructure from the air. Either course of action might have ended in disaster if relatively junior Russian officers on Cuba had responded by using tactical nuclear weapons.

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Fortunately, JFK was dissuaded by wiser counsel, notably his defence secretary Robert McNamara. After six days of increasingly acrimonious debate and discussion, he announced the dramatic news to the world, insisting that the weapons were removed and imposing a naval blockade to prevent more coming in. Khruschev’s supine response was to inform the presidium that the missiles had to go. He knew that his nuclear arsenal was heavily outgunned by the Americans’, and that he could not “win” a thermonuclear exchange. Publicly, however, the Soviet leader continued to bluster and threaten, and for another few days the world feared the worst.

Finally, at 10.25 a.m. on 24 October, as the blockade came into effect, news reached Washington that the Russians had stopped all ships heading for Cuba. “We are eyeball to eyeball,” said secretary of state Dean Rusk to Bundy, “and I think the other fellow just blinked.”

John F Kennedy (right) joking with Nikita Khrushchev in Vienna, 1961 - AFP/Getty Images
John F Kennedy (right) joking with Nikita Khrushchev in Vienna, 1961 - AFP/Getty Images

Not that the danger was over. Hastings is convinced – and I agree with him – that a hot war was nearly started by over-zealous military commanders on both sides. One Russian submarine skipper, for example, later said he almost fired a nuclear torpedo when he was being harassed by US warships and feared a war had already begun. At around the same time, a Russian anti-aircraft battery commander ordered the shooting down of an American U2 spy plane, an act of reckless aggression that prompted one US general to declare: “They’ve fired the first shot.” Castro, too, urged Khruschev to start a nuclear war if the Americans invaded Cuba. Luckily, saner people were running the White House and the Kremlin. “The sum of their statesmanship,” writes Hastings, “was greater than its parts.”

Eventually a deal was thrashed out that saved the Soviets a modicum of face: they agreed to remove the missiles in return for a guarantee that the US would not invade Cuba and a secret commitment to pull American nuclear missiles out of Turkey. Hastings makes it clear that Khruschev would have backed down without the latter condition, but JFK could not have known that.

The heart-stopping story of the missile crisis has been told many times before, but never with the narrative verve and panache that is Hastings’s hallmark. He has uncovered many new American, Russian, British and particularly Cuban sources that enable him to set the crisis in the context of its “times, personalities and the wider world”. It is also timely because, as a consequence of Russia’s recent invasion of Ukraine, we may be entering a new Cold War in which the threat of a nuclear war is once again very real. “The scope for a catastrophic miscalculation,” writes Hastings, “is as great now as it was in 1914 Europe or in the 1962 Caribbean.”

The lesson of 1962, he believes, is that the world “got lucky”. To avert catastrophe in the future our leaders must never “lose sight of the perils posed by the weapons at their command”. Checks upon the “use of terrible weapons by careless or deranged subordinates” need to be improved, and a wise leader should always show, as JFK did over Cuba, a firm political will that is leavened by prudence. Or, as Hastings puts it at the close of this brilliant, beautifully constructed and thrilling re-assessment of the most perilous moment in history: “Be afraid.”


Abyss is published by William Collins at £30. To order your copy call 0844 871 1514 or visit Telegraph Books