One Hell of a Gamble: The Secret History of the Cuban Missile Crisis by Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali, John Murray, $425 On October 22, 1962, the world stood on the brink of Armageddon. President John F Kennedy, who only days earlier had discovered the presence of nuclear missiles on Cuba, issued an ultimatum to Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. If Khrushchev did not accede to the ultimatum, nuclear war was an almost foregone conclusion.
Many books have been written about those days, with the Soviets' motivation and thinking made the subject of endless speculation because the files remained locked in Kremlin vaults.
Now, after various Soviet archives have been opened, these two authors - Russian historian and member of the Russian Academy of Sciences Aleksandr Fursenko, and Yale University history lecturer Timothy Naftali - have had access to documents that provide revealing information about the crisis, including Cuban dictator Fidel Castro's instability during the stand-off.
In recent days, further re-opened files have shown that there were more missiles, of worse potential, than Kennedy knew about at the time. But for this book the authors had access to the documents of the GRU (the intelligence wing of the Red Army) and to Khrushchev's own files, which give hour by hour updates at the heat of the crisis, sometimes in the form of scribbled notes, and provide a unique insight into what was going through the minds of Khrushchev and his advisers in his cabinet, the Presidium.
What they and the tapes of Ex Comm, Kennedy's crisis think-tank, show is that an elaborate intelligence network on both sides simply failed to provide the information the two superpower leaders needed so they could make the right decisions promptly.
The KGB relied on hearsay and bar-room gossip for much of its information, then passed it to Moscow as truth. If it was not so close to tragedy, it would be farcical.