One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War

Knopf, 2008, Hardcover

Product Description

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.

Product Details

Title: One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War
Sales Rank: 1435 in Books
Author: Michael Dobbs
Publisher: Knopf, 2008-06-03, Hardcover, 448 pages, ISBN: 1400043581
Package Dimensions: 9.37 x 5.98 x 1.73 inches, 1.76 pounds

Customer Reviews

Read it and be scared all over again: I was in college during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Between classes we sat in the Student Union Building watching CBS News on TV, waiting for a break in the tension - or the flash of a nuclear bomb. At one point the lights went out and one of my friends yelled and dove under a sofa for cover. (Someone had bumped the light switch.) The… More reviews

One Minute to Midnight...: Extensive research and documentation of that research. Interesting insights to the personal actions of actors in this realp-life drama. One of those books that is hard to put down. For me a rare experience: I wrote the author my compliments and specific response. I recommend this book.… More reviews

Doomsday Averted: This was a very good, day by day, in some cases minute by minute description of the events of the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. Certainly the topic has been done before, but Dobbs is a very thorough reporter and brings forth a lot of material I did not know about until now.
And this is an event I lived through. Dobbs makes the… More reviews

So close to the abyss: In reading "One Minute to Midnight", one gets the sense that, in a way, we are living those thirteen days in 1962 all over again, but in an extended fashion. This definitive book about the Cuban missile crisis is riveting from cover to cover as the author, Michael Dobbs, charts a timeline of horror and heart-stopping drama. What one side didn't know about… More reviews

We were in the midst of it: As a Cuban exile I was training for a job in Key West when the October Missile Crisis exploded. I was twenty, my wife nineteen and our baby three months old.
The narrow over-the-water highway connecting the mainland to Key West was closed to civilian trafic. Hundreds of missile launchers were transported from Homestead, Fl. to Key West along with… More reviews