by Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali, 1997, W.W. Norton & Company, New York

This book is a detailes account of the events that led up to and took place during the Cuban Missile Crisis.  The research that went into the writing of the book is well done and the writing is very good.  The only downside is that reading the book requires a lot of concentration on the details to get the full meaning of the book.

The authors’ conclusions were that Kennedy took the right course of action, despite his advisors advocating a more aggressive and belligerent stance.  I was struck, however, with how Khrushchev reacted in a time of crisis.  He clearly had made a colossal mistake in deciding to put nuclear missiles in Cuba, but his reasoned actions to remove them suggest that he was a smart individual who understood the implications of his actions.  It was also interesting that he seemed to have had a much better time dealing with Kennedy, his adversary, than Castro, his ally.

Thank goodness we made it through this one without a nuclear holocaust.  Hopefully, a hothead leader on either side won’t lead us down that path again, although, after reading this book, I am certain that if our current president had been in office in 1962, we would have suffered nothing short of a nuclear holocaust.