Abyss: The Cuban Missile Crisis 1962

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I teach a case study on the role of intelligence in this crisis as part of a course at the Australian National University, and most of the description here is familiar. But one thing I hadn’t appreciated was that the CIA’s Cuba analysts seem to have made one of the most fundamental analytical errors in mistaking the absence of evidence for evidence of absence. For example, political constraints and poor weather prevented many photo reconnaissance flights from being flown, so there was a substantial period in which developments on the ground in Cuba were not being monitored, but no alarm bells sounded in CIA assessments. 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.

Unreservedly, 5 stars. I'm old enough to remember the Cuban Missile Crisis. At the time, I lived about 30 miles, as the crow flies, from the US nuclear submarine depot in the Holy Loch. I remember going to bed at night wondering if I would waken next morning. A US friend told me his father, who lived very near New Year at the time, was similarly worried.Rather, two things jumped out to me. First, there is an expanded scope that gives Cuba equal billing with the Soviet Union and the United States. Second, there is Hastings himself, whose writing is imbued with sharp observations, idiosyncratic tangents, and no shortage of confidence. This is a new history for a new generation, putting fresh, international context on an astonishing military and political showdown. In those throes of the Cold War, hundreds of millions of people around the world were, for some days, terrified that a nuclear holocaust was imminent. Bringing together the threads of American bellicosity and Soviet brinksmanship, it becomes clear that while both sides eventually stepped away from destruction, that does not mean disaster was not terrifyingly close. Hastings was educated at Charterhouse School and University College, Oxford, which he left after a year.After leaving Oxford University, Max Hastings became a foreign correspondent, and reported from more than sixty countries and eleven wars for BBC TV and the London Evening Standard. 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.

Hastings’ account is balanced as he also examines the role of important Soviet officials including Defense Minister, Rodion Malinovsky who prepared the strategy to place missiles in Cuba; Anastas Mikoyan, the First Deputy of the Soviet Council of Ministers; Soviet Ambassador to the United States Anatoly Dobrynin; Alexandr Alekseev, the KGB station chief in Havana who had a close relationship with Castro; Andrei Gromyko, Minister of Foreign Affairs, and a number of others.

First night reviews

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. The book also goes over all of the incidents during the crisis such as the shooting down of the American U2 spy plane and the famous Soviet nuclear submarine whose captain allegedly was prevented from launching a nuclear missile by his subordinate and potentially preventing World War III. Hastings casts some doubt on the submarine incident as the timeline and the recollections of the witnesses are quite contradictory. Among his bestselling books Bomber Command won the Somerset Maugham Prize, and both Overlord and The Battle for the Falklands won the Yorkshire Post Book of the Year Prize. Hastings is a British writer, and so it’s not surprising that he affords some prominence to the UK position and the thoughts and actions of Prime Minister Harold Macmillan during the crisis. Kennedy obviously felt it important to keep Britain in the loop, though the impression this book gives is that he wasn’t expecting much in the way of useful strategic advice from that quarter. The overall effect is to show how unimportant the UK was to American thinking, despite the fact that the British expected to be wiped out as a modern society if nuclear war broke out. Such is life for junior alliance partners.