One Minute to Midnight by Michael Dobbs
A Review: Kennedy, Krushchev, and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War
Nov 12, 2008
October of 1962 was a very tense month in the history of U.S.-Soviet relations. Glasnost and Perestroika were terms that were two decades ahead of their time on the international scene. The Communist threat was very real and President John Kennedy found himself right at the trigger point of all out nuclear war. The Bay of Pigs invasion had failed miserably and left Fidel Castro in a position of strength when negotiating for help with Nikita Khrushchev and the Soviet Union for “protection” from the capitalists 90 miles north of the new communist government in Havana. The Soviet government had decided to test US resolve by placing armed nuclear warheads on their Caribbean outpost of communism.
The Author
Michael Dobbs is a British Citizen born in Belfast, Northern Ireland. His present job as a reporter for the Washington Post has keyed heavily on the collapse of the USSR and the demise of communism in general around the globe. His education has spanned the University of York, Princeton and Harvard. In this narrative he has brought in an amazing wealth of new information and photographs that are the result of years of research as well as up to the minute discoveries in archives that have just recently been made public. Some of this new information will shed new light on the myths and facts surrounding this pivotal time in US History.
New Facts
Dobbs points out to us that some of the mythic proportions of the showdown between Kennedy and Khrushchev were just that: myth. For instance, On October 24, the day that we have heard repeatedly that US and Soviet ships met “eyeball to eyeball”, Dobbs points out that the two ships that did turn around were never closer than 500 and 800 miles away from any US ship. In fact, Khrushchev had ordered both ships to turn around the day before! One other astonishing new fact to come out is that there were armed Soviet nuclear warheads just miles away aimed directly at the US outpost of Guantanamo Bay.
New Sources
The Author employed many means to uncover new facts. One method was to “triangulate disparate pieces of information, such as an interview with a Soviet veteran and an American intelligence intercept.” He also interviewed numerous other Soviet veterans who had never spoken about the crisis to western writers. Another unique source was Nikita Khrushchev’s own son, Sergei Khrushchev. He also, for the first time, reviewed several cans of raw surveillance footage that was available in the National Archives. This was one of his main sources for debunking the “eyeball to eyeball” myth.
Source
One Minute to Midnight, Kennedy, Khrushchev and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War by Michael Dobbs, 2008, Alfred A. Knopf Publishers
 |
