One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War
by Michael Dobbs
View on GoodreadsDobbs reconstructs Black Saturday — 27 October 1962 — hour by hour, using American, Soviet and Cuban archives that had not been worked before. The argument that emerges is that the crisis nearly ended in nuclear war not through any decision either leader made, but through the things neither of them knew: a U-2 lost over Siberia, warheads being trucked around Cuba, an F-106 landing with a live weapon aboard.
Core ideas
- The leaders had far less control than either side believed — the near-misses came from junior officers and lost pilots, not from decisions made in Washington or Moscow
- Castro was pushing for a first strike while Kennedy and Khrushchev were both searching for an exit, which makes the third party the most dangerous actor in the room
- Hour-by-hour reconstruction dismantles the tidy lesson of resolute brinkmanship that the crisis was later used to teach
Published2008
Pages448
ISBN9781400043583
ReadSep 2026
