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Kennedy, Khrushchev, And Castro On The Brink Of Nuclear War
Knopf
June 2008
On Sale: June 3, 2008
448 pages ISBN: 1400043581 EAN: 9781400043583 Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Political | Non-Fiction Biography
In October 1962, at the height of the Cold War, the
United States and the Soviet Union appeared to be sliding
inexorably toward a nuclear conflict over the placement of
missiles in Cuba. Veteran Washington Post reporter
Michael Dobbs has pored over previously untapped American,
Soviet, and Cuban sources to produce the most
authoritative book yet on the Cuban missile crisis. In his
hour-by-hour chronicle of those near-fatal days, Dobbs
reveals some startling new incidents that illustrate how
close we came to Armageddon.
Here, for the first
time, are gripping accounts of Khrushchev’s plan to
destroy the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo; 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
takes 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. He shows how these two leaders
recognized the terrifying realities of the nuclear age
while Castro—never swayed by conventional political
considerations—demonstrated the messianic ambition of a
man selected by history for a unique mission. As the story
unfolds, Dobbs brings us onto the decks of American ships
patrolling Cuba; inside sweltering Soviet submarines and
missile units as they ready their warheads; and onto the
streets of Miami, where anti-Castro exiles plot the
dictator’s overthrow.
Based on exhaustive new
research and told in breathtaking prose, here is a
riveting account of history’s most dangerous hours, full
of lessons for our time.
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