The world barely needs another book on the Cuban Missile Crisis, but Dobbs’s hour-by-hour overview is a worthy study of this much-mythologised fortnight. In most accounts, the flashpoint of the crisis is said to be Wednesday October 24 1962, when Soviet ships carrying supplies for nuclear missiles already based in Cuba approached the USA’s hastily imposed quarantine line – Dean Rusk’s ‘eyeball to eyeball’ moment. Dobbs begs to differ – by then the ships had already turned for home and were more than 500 miles from the Americans – and shifts attention to the Saturday, when one US plane was shot down and another took an unplanned detour over Soviet airspace. Handily, this not only restores the historical record, it also improves the dramatic thrust of Dobbs’s narrative, which peaks at the exact point you would expect in any decent airport thriller.
Dobbs’s chronological approach not only provides a natural sense of pace, but also allows him to illustrate the near-fatal timelag in communication between the two sides. This all taps into his wider theme – that while Kennedy and Khrushchev could not control every event that had a bearing on the crisis, they had just enough of a handle to avert the nuclear exchange that other actors such as Castro and bellicose American general Curtis LeMay desired.
We had a lucky escape, Dobbs concludes, but our luck was that Kennedy and Khrushchev were in charge rather than some of the politicians that followed them and had access to the big red button.
