One Minute to Midnight; Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008. Seventh printing [stated]. Hardcover. xvi, 426, [4] pages. List of Maps. A Note on Sources. Notes. Index. Some DJ wear. From the author's website: I spent much of my journalistic career covering the collapse of communism. After a stint in Rome as a correspondent for Reuters, I lived in Yugoslavia during the twilight years of Marshal Tito. I moved to Poland for The Washington Post, just in time to witness the extraordinary spectacle of workers rebelling against the "workers' state." I was the first western reporter to visit the Lenin shipyard in Gdansk in August 1980 and was standing in front of Boris Yeltsin when he climbed on a tank in August 1991 to face down Communist hardliners. In between, I reported on the Chernobyl nuclear catastrophe, Gorbachev-Reagan summits, the Tiananmen uprising in China, and the 1989 revolution in Romania. Other highlights of my journalistic career included exposing the Soviet atomic spy known as Mlad (Theodore Hall), and covering the Bosnia peace negotiations as the diplomatic reporter for The Post. In October 1962, the United States and the Soviet Union came to the brink of nuclear conflict over the deployment of Soviet missiles to Cuba. Michael Dobbs has pored over previously untapped American, Soviet and Cuban sources to provide the most authoritative book yet on the Cuban missile crisis. Here for the first time, are gripping accounts of Khrushchev's plan to destroy the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo; the accidental overflight of the Soviet Union by an American spy plane; the movement of Soviet nuclear warheads around Cuba during the tensest days of the crisis; the activities of CIA agents inside Cuba; and the crash landing of an American F-106 jet with a live nuclear weapon on board. Dobbs take us inside the White House and the Kremlin as Kennedy and Khrushchev--rational, intelligent men separated by an ocean of ideological suspicion--agonize over the possibility of war. Castro urged Khrushchev to consider a nuclear first strike against the United States. Dobbs brings us onto the decks of American ships patrolling Cuba; inside Soviet submarines and missile units as they ready their warheads; and into Miami, as anti-Castro exiles plot the dictator's overthrow. Condition: Very good / Good.
Keywords: Cuban Missile Crisis, Naval Quarantine, McGeorge Bundy, Fidel Castro, Khrushchev, Cuban Exiles, CIA, Central Intelligence, Cold War, ExComm, Executive Committee of the National Security Council, Guantanamo, William Harvey, Curtis LeMay, Charles Mault
ISBN: 9781400043583
[Book #77170]
Price: $35.00