This is the first history of the Cuban missile crisis that I have read. Having lived through it I thought I knew what happened. The new information that Plokhy provides comes from recently declassified documents from the Ukrainian Security Service archives.

The book is pretty scary, emphasising how poorly the two sides were informed and how much mutual misunderstanding there was. Fortunately both Kruschev and Kennedy were very fearful of a nuclear interchange (unlike some of their advisers) and so consistently withdrew from the brink.

I was starting my second year at Oxford in October 1962. We knew that Soviet ships carrying nuclear missiles were heading for Cuba and that the Americans were preparing a blockade of the island. We did not know that there were already nuclear armed intermediate range ballistic missiles already set up and ready to fire from Cuban sites. Neither, it appears, did Jack Kennedy. It was also not known that, fearful of hostile Soviet activity in Berlin, Kennedy was preparing an offer to the Russians of removing the U.S. intermediate range missiles based in Turkey. He had not shared this with most of the Pentagon, his own advisers nor NATO and the Turks. The U.S. military was in favour of an invasion ignorant of the Soviet nuclear missiles waiting for them.

On October 24th. the U.S.A. altered its alert level to Defcon2, the highest level short of actual war. The 1500 bombers of the Strategic Air Command took to the skies and flew repeated missions to the Soviet border. I was in my college beer cellar on that evening and we could hear the aircraft taking off from Brize Norton and passing over the city. I remember thinking that I was in as good a place as any to face annihilation; at least we could drink some very good wine from the fellow’s cellar before the end. Fortunately it was a missed opportunity and, largely because of the two leaders’ fear of nuclear war, the problem was resolved and tension eased.

Plokhy reminds us that the world owes Kennedy and Kruschev another debt for initiating the test ban treaty which began the significant reduction in global nuclear arsenals.

The book ends with a chilling epilogue reminding us that the problem of nuclear weapons has not gone away, rather it has increased with the withdrawal byTrump and Putin from the Inermediate-range nuclear forces treaty. Tactical nukes are on the agenda again with Iran, Israel, India, Pakistan and North Korea all being in the frame. The author suggests that it is important for citizens to re-learn the lessons of the past in order to make politicians act on them. Bring back CND!

A stylistic curiosity; the word “unbeknownst” was used more often than in any other book I have come across. Given the deficiencies of intelligence on both sides it was often needed! ( )