Great research, weak writing. | One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the Brink of...

One Minute to Midnight | One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War (Vintage) | Michael Dobbs

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	• One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War (Vintage) Michael Dobbs Vintage, 2009 - 480 pages average customer review:based on 50 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Great to see it from the other side

This book is excellent in regards to its ability to offer juxtaposition to Russia's leaders and our own. I am always interested in the human condition and crises management on a global scale. Power is such an intoxicating substance, but in the end- it is clear that we all just got lucky. Scary if you can wrap your head around that. We just got lucky...

Great research, weak writing.

Dobbs is obviously a talented researcher, but some of his prose is appalling. Most of this book reads like a mediocre college dissertation and the repetitive nature of some of the anecdotes is jarring. The stuff in here is fascinating, it's a shame it was let down by weak editing.

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One Minute to Midnight

Excellent, detailed chronology of all the key players involved in the most serious crisis of the cold war era presented with great insight to their individual personalities & backgrounds.
Highly recommended to fellow participants involved in the Cuban Missile Crisis. Most of us that served in the military at the time of this event had little knowledge of the overall perspective detailed by this author. We are indebted to him for his painstaking research & fair minded work. - LT W. D. Reed, USNR

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the Dark Days of October 1962

A US pilot is flying a high altitude (70,000 feet) U-2 plane somewhere in the vicinity of the Arctic Circle. His assignment? Grab radioactive samples from a recent Russian nuclear test in the area for US scientists to analyze. He has a major problem, however: he's lost. Plus he is running short of fuel and, since he's been strapped in a small cockpit for over eight hours, he has certain biological needs to tend to. He sends out several maydays (distress calls). Through his headset he receives a command to turn left. Another command tells him to turn right! He has no idea where he is. Then he picks up something from a ground radio station. It is folk music. Russian folk music. Not a good sign.

Charles Maultsby was the pilot who would end up flying approximately 1,000 miles off course and over Soviet Union airspace (the Chukot Peninsula). The USSR dispersed two squadrons of fighter planes to attempt to shoot him down. Worst of all, his flight took place on not just any old day but at the most critical point during the 13 day Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962.

Maultsby's dangerous flight (he eventually landed safely in Alaska) is one of many dramatic episodes that form the basis of the most recent book on perhaps the closest the planet has come to nuclear annihilation. And what a book it is. The author, Washington Post reporter Michael Dobbs, takes readers to where the action was occurring, whether in Maultsby's U-2, or in a Russian sub in the Caribbean being bombarded with depth charges by the US Navy, or through the eyes of two Cuban-Americans who have been infiltrated into Castro's Cuba to sabotage a copper mine operation and, failing in their mission, find themselves abandoned inside Cuba by their sponsors, the CIA. We also observe meetings of both Russian and US policymakers as they attempt to find a peaceful way out of this madness. And there is much from the Cuban perspective as well.

The author devotes most of the book to the final couple of days of the crisis, especially October 27, dubbed "Black Saturday," during which Maultsby flew offcourse and when another U-2 plane was shot down (and its pilot killed) over Cuba. In this very dangerous climate, Dobbs credits the two most important characters in the drama, US President John F. Kennedy and Soviet Chairman Nikita Khrushchev for holding the reigns on their advisers, many of whom were strongly urging military actions. The author suggests that because both Kennedy and Khrushchev had experienced war first-hand (WW II), they were able to subordinate their psychological and political needs and urges to the greater goal of humanity's survival and come up with a peaceful solution to the conflict.

Among new information on the crisis Michael Dobbs presents here: to reveal the exact locations of Russian missile storage bunkers in Cuba; to make clear the famous "eyeball to eyeball" confrontation between Russian ships approaching Cuba and the US blockade never occurred; and to publish a map of the flightpath of Maultsby's misadventure in the higher northern latitudes.

Despite my disgust at publisher A.A. Knopf for not supplying readers with a bibliography and my disappointment over the author's ignorance of US civil war casualties and his apparent uncritical acceptance of the Warren Commission's "findings" about Lee Oswald, I thoroughly enjoyed the book, by far the most fascinating one on the subject I have read. It'll grab you and keep you. Strongly recommended, but I would really like to know what happened to Professor Irvin Doress, who fled the US for Australia during the crisis.(see page 263)
Tim Koerner January 2010

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Tells It Like It Was

This book is a "must buy," for it tells the untold story of Cold War detente, tensions, dangers (real and imagined), ploys, and exposes the brutal thinking of many Cold Way hawks. You'll be shocked at how close the world really came to nuclear holocaust and, what generals were leading the charge. This book, for many, also puts the Kennedy Administration in a take-charge, do what's right for humanity, light. It's one to be proud up. For those who lived through the Cuban Missile Crisis, this book can help you appreciate level-headed thinking in the center of a storm. This book is a must-buy, whether for friends or... yourself. It is one you'll not want to put down until finished.

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In October 1962, at the height of the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union came to the brink of nuclear conflict over the placement of Soviet missiles in Cuba. In this hour-by-hour chronicle of those tense days, veteran Washington Post reporter Michael Dobbs reveals just 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 handling of Soviet nuclear warheads on Cuba; and the extraordinary story of a U-2 spy plane that got lost over Russia at the peak of the crisis.

Written like a thriller, One Minute to Midnight is an exhaustively researched account of what Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. called ?the most dangerous moment in human history,? and the definitive book on the Cuban missile crisis.

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