ABYSS EB

Max Hastings

• Publisher: William Collins
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780008365004
• eBook ISBN: 9780008365011
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military Biographies
• Index: History

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

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.

Max Hastings's graphic 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.

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Epigraphs
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Introduction
• A Timeline of Significant Global Events during the Cold War Era
• Principal Participants in the Missile Crisis
• Time Zones and Spellings
• Prologue: Operation Zapata 17–19 April 1961
• 1 Cuba Libre
• 2 Mother Russia
• 3 Yanquis, Amerikantsy
• 4 The Red Gambit: Operation Anadyr
• 5 The Shock
• 6 Drumbeat
• 7 ‘They Think We’re Slightly Demented on This Subject’
• 8 The President Speaks
• 9 Blockade
• 10 ‘The Other Fellow Just Blinked’
• 11 Khrushchev Looks for an Out
• 12 Black Saturday
• 13 The Brink
• 14 Endgame
• 15 ‘This Strange and Still Scarcely Explicable Affair’
• Picture Section
• Acknowledgements
• Notes and References
• Bibliography
• Index
• Also by Max Hastings
• About the Author
• About the Publisher