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. Another is the cultural and national assumptions that all those involved brought to the table. Hastings points out that, "In the eyes of all save Americans, a piece is missing from both the fevered October 1962 discussions in Washington and most histories published since. US leaders took it for granted that their country could not be expected to endure the presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba. It was undoubtedly the case that domestic opinion regarded the deployment as representing as much a mortal insult as a deadly peril. But, echoing Harold Macmillan's courteous observation to JFK, there was no more logical or legal cause why the Cubans should not choose to host nuclear weapons on their soil than that the Turks, Italians or British should be denied such a right. European NATO members had lived for years with a proximate Soviet atomic threat. The American debate was conducted by men wearing historical blinkers - sharing the assumption that the United States had privileges in determining what was, and was not, acceptable in Cuba such as were a commonplace to President Theodore Roosevelt, but represented an anachronism in 1962." The US took its imperialism for granted, much as the Soviet Union assumed that America was weak and decadent. Hastings comments elsewhere that Kennedy's reality was not Khruschev's reality, that they did not see the world in the same way and could not assume that the other would react in the same way to events as they would themselves. That is good advice in personal interactions, never mind in international affairs, and it is remarkable that it was not applied more thoughtfully during the Crisis. An extraordinary new account of the Cuban Missile Crisis and how it created some of the most dangerous, unstable years in world history – from the number one bestselling historian Max Hastings. 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. A brilliant, beautifully constructed and thrilling re-assessment of the most perilous moment in history' Daily Telegraph

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. Obviously – as we do not yet inhabit a world of radioactive ash – the missiles of October never flew. Still, the margins were so thin, and the human element so pronounced, that it is unsurprising that this event has been the subject of numerous, sometimes excellent books. Hastings recounts the history of the crisis from the viewpoints of national leaders, Soviet officers, Cuban peasants, American pilots and British peacemakers. Hastings, success as an author has always rested upon eyewitness interviews, archival work, tape recordings, and insightful analysis – his current work is no exception. The positions, comments, and actions of President John F. Kennedy, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, and Fidel Castro among many other important personalities are on full display.But, of course, it wasn’t and Max Hastings enthralling book tells how the world almost ended sixty years ago.

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. 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.Superb… reads like a thriller as the gripping drama of the Cold War power politics plays out behind closed doors in Washington, Moscow and Havana” - Daily Mail