Abyss

Abyss: A Times History Book of the Year 2022

From the #1 bestselling historian Max Hastings: “the heart-stopping story of the missile crisis”, says the Daily Telegraph.

The 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis was the most perilous event in history, when mankind faced a looming nuclear collision between the United States and the Soviet Union. During those weeks, the world gazed into the abyss of potential annihilation.

Max Hastings’s graphic new history tells the story from the viewpoints of national leaders, Russian officers, Cuban peasants, American pilots, and British disarmers. Hastings deploys his accustomed blend of eye-witness interviews, archive documents and diaries, White House tape recordings, and top-down analysis. He first paints word-portraits of the Cold War experiences of Fidel Castro’s Cuba, Nikita Khrushchev’s Russia, and Kennedy’s America, and then describes the nail-biting Thirteen Days in which Armageddon beckoned.

Hastings began researching this book believing that he was exploring a past event from twentieth-century history. He is as shocked as millions of us around the world to discover that the rape of Ukraine gives this narrative a hitherto unimaginable twenty-first-century immediacy. We may be witnessing the onset of a new Cold War between nuclear-armed superpowers.

To contend with today’s threat, which Hastings fears will prove enduring, it is critical to understand how, sixty years ago, the world survived its last glimpse into the abyss. Only by fearing the worst, he argues, can our leaders hope to secure the survival of the planet.