Brilliantly told... compelling... Hastings has cleverly woven the story together from all sides describing them in dramatic, almost hour by hour detail... this is a scary book. Hastings sees little evidence that today's leaders understand each other any better than they did in 1962' Sunday Times THAT was some stuff. And that was just before Vietnam. Hastings, a masterful British military historian, researched this during the COVID pandemic and published just after Russia invaded Ukraine, leading him to useful comparisons of then and now, of Kruschev and Putin. 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. Here the well known 13 Days of the Cuban Missile Crisis from 1962 is examined from the perspective of not only the usual suspects of the American and Soviet leadership, but also the Brits, who by then had been nestled for over a decade with a threatening USSR, along with the rest of Europe. Hastings sets the scene for the crisis by starting with the story of Castro and the Cuban revolution and of course the Bay of Pigs disaster. He then moves to describe the political and social situation in both the US and the Soviet Union and also briefly goes over the biography of Khrushchev and Kennedy.

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. Between July and September 1962, Khrushchev secretly deployed a range of nuclear missiles in Cuba. Together with those missiles, came the deployment of tens of thousands of troops and bombers, SAM missiles and bombers. Khrushchev mistakenly and naively thought that ... 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 excellent book on the Cuban Missile Crisis is terrifying, not least because of its contemporary relevance as relations between Russia and the West enter a new, colder phase. The events that unfolded in late 1962 as the USA realised that the Soviet Union had deployed nuclear weapons in Cuba and sought to secure their removal are quite possibly the closest humanity has ever come to self-extinction. Hastings journalistic instinct for storytelling serves to capture the drama of those frantic days, and his understanding of the principal actors involved on all sides, and of their motivations, add a further depth of insight. All told, this is a first-rate piece of popular narrative history. A brilliant, beautifully constructed and thrilling reassessment of the most perilous moment in history” - Daily TelegraphFor 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. It wasn’t until 1992 that the US learned that the Soviets had had tactical (short-range) nuclear weapons at their disposal – each with a charge similar to that detonated over Hiroshima – and that plans had been drawn up to permit their use in the event of a land invasion. Should this have happened, had Kennedy chosen to follow the recommendations of his military chiefs, a nuclear response would have been probable. The ensuing public pressure would have made it extremely hard for the US president not to retaliate in kind. Kennedy was distrustful of his military and intelligence advisers, partly because of the previous year’s Bay of Pigs fiasco – Dwight Eisenhower’s planned invasion of Cuba that Kennedy had felt obliged to carry through – and we should only be thankful that some in his circle, under his calm leadership, were able to stem their hubris and sabre-rattling. Hastings correctly argues that the Kennedy brothers became Castro haters due to the Bay of Pigs, an emotion they did not feel previously. They felt humiliated and became obsessed with Cuba as they sought revenge – hence Operation Mongoose to get rid of Castro which Robert Kennedy was put in charge of. As the narrative unfolds a true portrait of Castro emerges. H A brilliant, beautifully constructed and thrilling re-assessment of the most perilous moment in history' Daily Telegraph

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.” 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.

I wanted to read about the Cuban missile crisis for quite some time so the release of Max Hastings' The Abyss was perfect. Hastings does a fantastic job of telling the terrifying story of the crisis using both historical archives but also eye witness testimonies. An excellent narrative of a crucial geopolitical event. What I liked most about this extremely well researched & written book is the fearlessness with which the author shares his personal perspectives and assessments of events and characters all through the book. Hastings doesnt shy away from making informed judgements which I found a useful guide in understanding the why behind the what.

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.The 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis is widely considered to be the closest the world has come to a full nuclear exchange. In a ploy apparently meant to taunt the United States, Soviet Premier Nikita Khruschev sent medium and intermediate range ballistic missiles to the Caribbean nation, along with enough atomic warheads to devastate America’s eastern seaboard. 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. Once those missiles were discovered by U2 overflights, President John F. Kennedy came under intense pressure from the military establishment – especially a barely-hinged Curtis Lemay, head of the Strategic Air Command – to destroy the missiles by airstrike, followed by an invasion. Indeed, the desire of the armed forces for swift action led them to make the kind of impossible guarantees typically reserved for salesmen of used automobiles. From the #1 bestselling historian Max Hastings 'the heart-stopping story of the missile crisis' Daily Telegraph Meanwhile, Hastings also presents a portrait of Castro that strongly belies his popular image as a romantic revolutionary. Specifically, Castro encouraged Khrushchev to launch a preemptive nuclear strike, believing – not unlike North Korea’s Kim Jong Un – that the fate of his regime overrode all other considerations. Castro’s willingness to start an atom-splitting war – which he personally admitted long after the Crisis ended – thus provided a pretty good reason for the U.S. to insist upon putting distance between Castro and the Soviet Union’s ballistic armaments. Hastings, though, never seems to realize he is wrongfooting himself.