The Abyss: Nuclear Crisis Cuba 1962

by Max Hastings

Overview

Bestselling author Max Hastings offers a welcome re-evaluation of one of the most gripping and tense international events in modern history—the Cuban Missile Crisis—providing a people-focused narrative that explores the attitudes and conduct of Russians, Cubans, Americans, and a terrified world that followed each moment as it unfolded.

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.

Combining in-depth research with Hasting’s well-honed insights, The Abyss is a human history that unfolds on a wide, colorful canvas. As the action moves back and forth from Moscow to Washington, DC, to Havana, Hastings seeks to explain, as much as to describe, the attitudes and conduct of the Soviets, Cubans, and Americans, and to recreate the tension and heightened fears of countless innocent bystanders whose lives hung in the balance. Reflecting on the outcome of these events, he reveals how the aftermath of this momentous crisis continues to reverberate today.

Powerful, and riveting, filled with compelling detail and told with narrative flair, The Abyss is history at its finest.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780062980175
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	10/17/2023
Pages:	576
Sales rank:	210,385
Product dimensions:	5.80(w) x 8.80(h) x 1.50(d)

About the Author

Max Hastings is the author of twenty-eight books, most about conflict, and between 1986 and 2002 served as editor in chief of the Daily Telegraph, then as editor of the Evening Standard. He has won many prizes, for both his journalism and his books, the most recent of which are the bestsellers Vietnam, The Secret War, Catastrophe, and All Hell Let Loose. Knighted in 2002, Hastings is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, an Honorary Fellow of King’s College London, and a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He has two grown children, Charlotte and Harry, and lives with his wife, Penny, in West Berkshire, where they garden enthusiastically.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations xiii

Introduction xvii

A Timeline of Significant Global Events during the Cold War Era xxvii

Principal Participants in the Missile Crisis xxxv

Time Zones and Spellings xxxviii

Prologue: Operation Zapata 17-19 April 1961 1

1 Cuba Libre 23

1 The American Colony 23

2 Granma 35

3 The Liberator 45

2 Mother Russia 58

1 Triumph in Space, Hunger on Earth 58

2 'The Shark' 71

3 Khrushchev Abroad 84

3 Yanquis, Amerikantsy 99

1 American Pie 99

2 Jack 107

3 Nukes 119

4 The Red Gambit: Operation Anadyr 135

5 The Shock 174

6 Drumbeat 209

1 The President is Told 209

2 The Warmakers 222

7 'They Think We're Slightly Demented on This Subject' 234

1 Behind Closed Doors 234

2 'Iron Ass' 247

3 The Decision 253

8 The President Speaks 266

1 Kennedy Confronts his People 266

2 Khrushchev Confronts Disaster 285

9 Blockade 290

1 High, Confused Sea 290

2 'Shoot the Rudders Off!' 309

10 'The Other Fellow Just Blinked' 326

1 Hair Triggers 326

2 'Should I take out Cuba?' 330

11 Khrushchev Looks for an Out 343

1 'Everything to Prevent War' 343

2 The Kremlin Decision 352

3 'A Trial of Will' 364

12 Black Saturday 371

1 Castro Frightens Khrushchev 371

2 The Soviets Shoot 383

13 The Brink 390

1 Impasse 390

2 The Hounding of B-59 407

3 The Offer 413

14 Endgame 424

1 Time Runs Out 424

2 The Cubans Cut Up Rough 440

15 'This Strange and Still Scarcely Explicable Affair' 450

Acknowledgements 481

Notes and References 485

Bibliography 507

Index 515

Editorial Reviews

★ 08/08/2022

Hastings (Operation Pedestal) highlights in this engrossing account just how close the U.S. and the Soviet Union came to nuclear war in October 1962. Contending that Russia’s recent invasion of Ukraine gives the Cuban Missile Crisis “a deeply distressing immediacy,” he notes that all nuclear nations “take risks that could one day prove disastrous for humanity, because somebody miscalculates, overreaches, or concedes to subordinates opportunities to do so.” Throughout, Hastings draws sharp personality profiles of John F. Kennedy, Nikita Khrushchev, Fidel Castro, and their top-level advisers, and expertly mines archival records to recreate the contemporaneous rationale for their decision-making, even when it looks foolish or reckless in hindsight. He also expands beyond the “pivotal thirteen days” when the crisis reached its height, providing essential context in cogent discussions of the Cuban Revolution, the Bay of Pigs invasion, the Soviet space program, and more. Flashes of color (“What sort of camp is it?” asked Khrushchev when told he’d been invited to visit President Eisenhower at Camp David in 1959. “A place they put people they don’t trust?”) enliven sober warnings about the need for world leaders who can sift through multiple sources of information and back down from a fight when the cost is too great. This riveting history speaks clearly to the present moment. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

"Hastings . . . highlights in this engrossing account just how close the U.S. and the Soviet Union came to nuclear war in October 1962. . . . Throughout, Hastings draws sharp personality profiles of John F. Kennedy, Nikita Khrushchev, Fidel Castro, and their top-level advisers, and expertly mines archival records to recreate the contemporaneous rationale for their decision-making, even when it looks foolish or reckless in hindsight. . . . This riveting history speaks clearly to the present moment." — Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“One of the greatest living historians tackles the Cuban missile crisis. . . . Hastings argues that Kennedy prevented a catastrophic conflict by deciding that [bombing strategic sites and invading] was a bad idea. Instead, he ordered a blockade and sent a warning to Khrushchev, who withdrew the missiles. The author’s painfully insightful conclusion credits Kennedy with brilliant statesmanship but adds that most successors would have chosen war. The definitive account of a brief yet frightening period in global history.
— Kirkus Reviews

Hastings . . . masterfully places the Cuban Missile Crisis within the tensions and relations between the United States and the Soviet Union in their Cold War context. The tense and suspenseful atmosphere interweaving the negotiations and political developments . . . are palpable in this elegantly written account. The personalities of all major players . . . are all fully realized in this book. . . . Based on extensive archival research, including in the UK, this eminently readable account provides a nice, single volume overview of the Cuban Missile Crisis. — Library Journal

The Cuban Missile Crisis . . . easily could have escalated to nuclear war. . . . 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. . . . 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. — Booklist

“[Hastings’s] incisive account of the standoff between the US and Russia has chilling and timely lessons 60 years on . . . . Abyss provides chastening lessons on how easily things can spiral out of control but also how catastrophe can be averted.” — The Guardian

"Max Hastings’s brilliantly told account of the Cuban missile crisis shows how the word 'abyss' is no exaggeration for the drama that unfolded 60 years ago. . . . Hastings has cleverly woven the story together from all sides, most interestingly from little-known Cuban sources previously unused in American, Russian or European accounts." — Air Mail

"Max Hastings brings his signature style—a mixture of the grand (sweeping insights into great events) and the granular (carefully sifted details from diaries and letters of ordinary people)—to the much-studied subject of the Cuban missile crisis. The result is a book to match the best things ever written on the subject in terms of immediacy and drama.” — Christian Science Monitor

From the Publisher

Unquestionably the best single-volume history of the war ever written.”

Sunday Times on All Hell Let Loose

05/01/2022

In his account of the Cuban Missile Crisis, celebrated journalist/military historian Hastings shifts his focus to the attitudes of Soviet, Cuban, and U.S. participants, explaining as much as describing their actions. With a 75,000-copy first printing.

Library Journal

John Hopkins’s rich, dramatic voice suits this account of the 13 days in 1962 when the world was on the verge of a nuclear catastrophe: the Cuban Missile Crisis. Hopkins artfully meets the challenge of describing the mutual brinksmanship that took place between the Soviet Union and the U.S. when Russian missiles were discovered a mere 90 miles from American shores. Hopkins never hurries his pace or overplays the emotion. The central figures—JFK in the White House and Khrushchev in the Kremlin—are vividly revealed under stress. Here is an audiobook for those who relish detailed and dramatic history, those who want to know how we got to where we are today with the Russians, or those who simply appreciate cliff-hanger situations narrated with exceptional skill. A.D.M. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine

DECEMBER 2022 - AudioFile

John Hopkins’s rich, dramatic voice suits this account of the 13 days in 1962 when the world was on the verge of a nuclear catastrophe: the Cuban Missile Crisis. Hopkins artfully meets the challenge of describing the mutual brinksmanship that took place between the Soviet Union and the U.S. when Russian missiles were discovered a mere 90 miles from American shores. Hopkins never hurries his pace or overplays the emotion. The central figures—JFK in the White House and Khrushchev in the Kremlin—are vividly revealed under stress. Here is an audiobook for those who relish detailed and dramatic history, those who want to know how we got to where we are today with the Russians, or those who simply appreciate cliff-hanger situations narrated with exceptional skill. A.D.M. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine

DECEMBER 2022 - AudioFile

★ 2022-08-16
One of the greatest living historians tackles the Cuban missile crisis.

In his long, distinguished career, Hastings has masterfully covered both world wars, the Korean War, and Vietnam. In his latest, he thoroughly explores a fraught set of circumstances that almost lead to World War III. He sets the scene with a highly illuminating description of the Cold War world in 1960. The Soviet Union, barely recovered from World War II, was no match for the wealthy U.S., but its flamboyant premier, Nikita Khrushchev had convinced the world that he commanded a massive intercontinental ballistic missile arsenal—although he didn’t. Fidel Castro’s seizure of power in Cuba in early 1959 made him popular in America for several months until he seized all American businesses and resorted to violence to maintain his position. When John F. Kennedy took office in January 1961, the purportedly covert action to overthrow Castro was underway. To his everlasting regret, Kennedy assumed that its organizers knew what they were doing. Delighted at crushing America’s Bay of Pigs invasion but certain there was more fighting to come, Castro appealed to the Soviets, who responded favorably. Aware of Russian shipments arriving in Cuba, Kennedy’s administration assumed that these contained conventional weapons until overflights photographed nuclear missile sites. Hastings does not hide his contempt for Khrushchev’s decision to send atomic weapons. Explanations exist because Khrushchev, his son, and many high-level officials wrote memoirs. All blamed him, but Khrushchev himself insisted that it was a sensible response to American missiles on his nation’s border. Early on in the crisis, almost everyone, Kennedy included, agreed to bomb strategic sites and invade, which would likely lead to war. Hastings argues that Kennedy prevented a catastrophic conflict by deciding that this was a bad idea. Instead, he ordered a blockade and sent a warning to Khrushchev, who withdrew the missiles. The author’s painfully insightful conclusion credits Kennedy with brilliant statesmanship but adds that most successors would have chosen war.

The definitive account of a brief yet frightening period in global history.

Kirkus Reviews