On the Brink; Americans and Soviets Reexamine the Cuban Missile Crisis

New York: Farrar , Straus and Giroux [The Noonday Press], 1990. Second Edition [stated]. Noonday Press edition. Trade paperback. xvi, [2], 428, [2] pages. Preface to the Second Edition. Dramatis Personae. Authors' Note. Footnotes. Notes. Chronology. Afterword. Index. Foreword by McGeorge Bundy. Professor and international security expert James G. Blight began his career as a cognitive psychologist, but a decade later had begun research on prevention of a nuclear holocaust in a world of increasing proliferation of nuclear weapons. His research led him to study the closest scenario to a nuclear war: the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. He has since become an expert on the subject. David A. Welch is a CIGI senior fellow and professor of political science at the University of Waterloo. His book, Painful Choices: A Theory of Foreign Policy Change, was the winner of the International Studies Association ISSS Book Award and his book, Justice and the Genesis of War, won the 1994 Edgar S. Furniss Award for an outstanding contribution to national security studies. He is co-editor of Intelligence and the Cuban Missile Crisis. Derived from a Kirkus review: Oral history at its finest--presenting transcripts of several conferences held over the past year and a half exploring the 1962 Cuban missile crisis; edited by Blight and Welch, a research fellow at the Center. What makes this a fascinating volume is that the participants are none other than the major actors in that Kennedy-Khrushchev morality play. At the first conference, the group included George Ball, McGeorge Bundy, Douglas Dillon, Robert McNamara, Paul Nitze, Dean Rusk, Arthur Schlesinger, Ted Sorenson, and Maxwell Taylor--practically a roll call of the leading figures in JFK's administration. There is a minimum of historical posturing here as the reunion leads to a genuine desire to fathom what went wrong, what went right, and what lessons the crisis holds for today. What stuns here, finally, is the inability of the scholars and policymakers--almost three decades later--to give up their respective intellectual analyses and visceral declamations. Condition: Very good.

Keywords: Nuclear Weapons, Cold War, Cuba, Missile Crisis, Cuban Missile, Warheads, Theodore Sorensen, Maxwell Taylor, Dean Rusk, Robert McNamara, Paul Nitze, Douglas Dillon, Cambridge Conference, Moscow Conference, George Ball, Graham Allison, McGeorge Bundy

ISBN: 0374226342

[Book #76848]

Price: $35.00