The book presents an historic narrative that details the events that lead up to the Cuban Missile crisis. Aside from the American slaughter in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, this is the closest the world has ever really come to all-out nuclear war, and hopefully that will always remain the case. It’s an important lesson from history, and one that I think it’s important for everyone to be conscious of.
What I really admired about Max Hastings’ work is the way in which he was able to write fairly detached portraits of every figure he detailed. He doesn’t portray history as good guys and bad guys, but with different groups of flawed people with conflicting interests. He is just as quick to raise criticisms of Fidel Castro and Nikita Khrushchev as he is to raise those of John F Kennedy – and he offers praise where praise is due too. In doing so, he does a fantastic of job of helping you to get into the mindsets of the ordinary people who supported them.
What’s more is that he does an excellent job of doing an historic portrait of the era in which these events took place. Obviously, this can never be truly comprehensive, because there’s no way to accurately wrap up a whole nation and culture in a short book, but he makes it really easy to understand the mindsets of the people in Russia, America, and Cuba as they went into this crisis, which of course makes everything easier to understand.
I also thought that it was really valuable for him to include a lot of contemporary media perspectives on the situation as it unfolded. It’s interesting to compare the ways in which the media continues to work to this day, and it’s a useful reminder of the ways in which reports at the time try to mould a narrative, and often without all the facts. It’s also useful to see how it sways public opinion, and consequently, how governments respond, and often not in the best ways.
Of course, the most interesting part details the crisis itself, but this would have been nowhere near as impactful without all of the context that Hastings provides before it. Altogether, it was a rather extraordinary sequence of events, and the most profound thing, I felt, was that two countries almost initiated a nuclear war, despite neither nation actually wanting to do so. This will always be the case and we must never lose sight of that. Our world leaders in particular must remember that nobody ever wants a nuclear war, and because that feeling is universal nobody will ever do it… but with extreme stresses and misunderstanding, somebody could do so without truly understanding what is happening or what they have done.
Once again, I want to reiterate that this is a very important lesson from history – one that illustrates that no nation really has its hands clean, despite how it might present itself, and how ordinary people will be the ones that end up paying the price as a consequence of governments trying to exert their power and influence too far. It’s a sad sequence of events, but also a very lucky and positive one in the long run.
Rating: 9.5/10
