New from Max Hastings: Abyss – the Cuban Missile Crisis 1962

AByss

Abyss

The Cuban Missile Crisis 1962

By Max Hastings

Published by Harper Collins UK

RRP $34.99 in paperback

ISBN 9780008364991

As we revisit this historical event, the question may well be asked: are we headed for another abyss?

The author’s own words in the introduction offer a chilling insight. ‘More recently my narrative, which seemed of solely historical interest when I embarked upon it, has gained a shocking new immediacy and relevance, thanks to the Russian invasion and rape of Ukraine’.

He believes the scope for a catastrophic miscalculation is as great now as it was in 1914 Europe or in 1962.

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 seemed to be on the brink of annihilation.

Hastings’ new book tells the story of those tense days from the viewpoints of national leaders, Russian officers, Cuban peasants, American pilots and British disarmers. He deploys his accustomed blend of eye-witness interviews, archive documents and diaries, White House tape recordings, top-down analysis, first to paint word-portraits of the Cold War experiences of Fidel Castro’s Cuba, Nikita Khrushchev’s Russia and Kennedy’s America; then to describe the nail-biting thirteen days in which Armageddon beckoned.

In Abyss, Hastings demonstrates how easily things can spiral out of control. But he shows us how catastrophe can be averted.

In an era in which we are witnessing a heightening of tensions among nuclear armed adversaries, any lessons on how to avoid an unimaginable catastrophe must surely be compulsory reading for those able to influence such events.

A more detailed review here:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/oct/16/abyss-the-cuban-missile-crisis-1962-by-max-hastings-review-the-eve-of-destruction

2 comments

Reading today’s press, it looks like fact, fiction and history are all meeting to end the world as we know it! In 1983 the USSR reckoned that NATO’s Able Archer exercise was a smokescreen and that NATO was planning to deliver a genuine nuclear first strike. So we have to ask, was the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis “the most perilous event in history”? When compared with NATO’s Able Archer Exercise in 1983, we doubt the Cuban Missile crisis was “the most perilous event in history” but such a comparison may be splitting hairs as both events came perilously close to starting a nuclear war and today with Putin on edge matters might be even worse.

As to be expected though, Max Hastings certainly did his chosen non-fiction topic justice in his book about the Abyss we all faced in 1962. Mind you the subject matter would be riveting had you not read about it beforehand. The extent to which John F Kennedy took his NATO partners into his confidence during the Cuban crisis remains debatable. In 1962, the British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, colloquially known as SuperMac, was supposedly JFK’s chief confidant and adviser throughout the crisis. What were the consequences of that?

For starters it meant that anything JFK (via the CIA) and/or SuperMac shared with MI6 about how best to manage the crisis may have been shared with Nikita Khrushchev and Fidel Castro via Kim Philby (or others unknown in his circle) who was then still of importance to the USSR albeit no longer in MI6. In addition, Dr Richard Alan Fairclough (ex MI1 and a leading British scientist) was a close confidant of SuperMac. Since then Richard Fairclough (aka Roger Burlington) featured in The Burlington Files series of fact based spy novels which were centred on the life and times of his son Bill Fairclough (aka Edward Burlington, MI6 codename JJ).

The absence of some of the forgoing information in any book of note about the Cuban missile crisis might raise questions as to its completeness. On the other hand, one could ask were the Fairclough family involved in the seventies in the Haitian equivalent to the Cuban Bay of Pigs? Who knows but just because someone claims they know the truth is never the whole story! Before it’s too late we had all best read Beyond Enkription, the only novel published to date in The Burlington Files series, to find out what has been disclosed to date on all these issues. As for today’s concerns, hopefully in 50 years from now we can read about today’s Kim Philby and Oleg Penkovsky. In the meantime, if you think you know all there is to know about these things, have a look at a brief but intriguing news article dated 31 October 2022 about Pemberton’s People in MI6 in TheBurlingtonFiles website.

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