Photograph: Pictorial Press Ltd/Alamy
It is hard for many of us to imagine, 60 years on from the Cuban missile crisis, the atmosphere of a time in which many assumed all-out war between the superpowers was coming and that such a clash would necessarily be nuclear. But as the journalist and historian Max Hastings reminds us in Abyss, relations between China, Russia and the US are as fractious now as ever. Levels of mutual understanding, and the will to accommodate new understandings, are hardly better than in 1962; the scope for an irreversible error – even a deliberate act – remains.
Between July and September 1962, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev secretly deployed intermediate-range, medium-range and short-range nuclear missiles to bases across Cuba. These were accompanied by tens of thousands of troops disguised as civilians, fighter jets, bombers, surface-to-air missile launchers and other munitions. Fidel Castro’s revolutionary government had taken power in January 1959 and in 1961 openly pledged allegiance to the Soviet Union. Earlier that year, the US had backed a disastrous invasion of Cuba aimed at toppling Castro. Publicly, Khrushchev claimed his missiles were to vouchsafe Cuban sovereignty. But more than this, his move was a ploy to counter the recent installation of US nuclear missiles in Turkey.
