Between July and September 1962, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev secretly deployed intermediate-range, medium-range and short-range nuclear missiles to bases across Cuba. Sadly for the World at large, this angry, bellicose and deeply resentful man took the crisis to the very edge of a cataclysmic inferno before accepting the necessity to retreat. In reality, a number of the bases they considered to still be under construction had been battle-ready for at least a week; the true number of Soviet personnel in the Caribbean was 43,000. Max Hastings 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.

Hastings has cleverly woven the story together from all sides describing them in dramatic, almost hour by hour detail. Hastings commentary on this is devastating: "In the course of the Cold War the Americans, British and other allies launched many ill-judged initiatives. We also share information about your use of our site with our social media, advertising and analytics partners. In the Soviet Union, the crisis was caused, driven, and finally resolved because of the actions of Nikita Khrushchev, a man who survived Stalin’s purges and worked his way up the Kremlin bureaucracy. Hastings offers a very thoughtful approach to the study of history while applying his immense analytical skills.

Longe estava eu de imaginar que a mais de cinco mil quilómetros de distância havia quem também fizesse escolhas. 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.

Obviously – as we do not yet inhabit a world of radioactive ash – the missiles of October never flew. The diplomatic and military dance presented places the reader inside the ExCom Committee in Washington, the Presidium in Russia, and the seat of the Cuban government in Havana, and interactions with NATO allies. In January this year, Russia’s deputy foreign minister threatened to deploy “military assets” to Cuba if the US continued to support Ukrainian sovereignty.The ensuing public pressure would have made it extremely hard for the US president not to retaliate in kind. Yet it is generally accepted that he had already mooted the plan while staying at his Black Sea dacha, the very place where he so often peered across the limpid waters through binoculars and inveighed against the American Jupiter missiles sited in neighboring Turkey. E claro que o povo tinha esse direito, e com igual clareza os “os revolucionários barbudos” souberam interpretar esse desejo. And it’s not the ultimate judgments, for Hastings’s conclusions – that Khrushchev acted precipitously, that the American military establishment verged on the insane, and that President Kennedy handled the situation quite well – are fairly standard. Even the strategic advantage gained by placing nuclear missiles in Cuba – when both sides had by this time submarines capable of launching ballistic missiles – was slight.

It seems mistaken to take for granted that President Kennedy would resist the urgings of his military chiefs to go to war, or that a conflict could thereafter have been confined to conventional weapons, since the choice would have been partially dependent upon the discretion and restraint of Soviet officers under American bombardment on Cuban battlefields.

My first reaction to the crisis of October 1962 was selfish: my Halloween was cancelled so there’d be no haul of candy. The book also goes over all of the incidents during the crisis such as the shooting down of the American U2 spy plane and the famous Soviet nuclear submarine whose captain allegedly was prevented from launching a nuclear missile by his subordinate and potentially preventing World War III. The 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis is widely considered to be the closest the world has come to a full nuclear exchange.

It draws heavily on the recordings of discussions between President Kennedy and his military and civilian advisors during the crisis. Hastings, success as an author has always rested upon eyewitness interviews, archival work, tape recordings, and insightful analysis – his current work is no exception. For example, he enjoys twitting the Americans over their insistence that sovereign Cuba could not be allowed to house nuclear missiles, even though Turkey hosted American Jupiter batteries.Kennedy, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, and Fidel Castro among many other important personalities are on full display. Unlike the authoritarian regimes in Russia and Cuba, America’s decision-making has been made transparent by the voluminous transcripts that have been released.