Reddit reviews One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War

Generally speaking there were two "very close calls":

• 1962, the Cuban Missile Crisis. You probably know about this one. The danger, most historians currently believe, is less that either nation would voluntarily start the war. Rather, the situation quickly devolved down to threats from accidental escalation between relatively low-level military forces, and the possibility of misjudgment. So one example, there was an American military ship dropping depth charges onto a Soviet submarine, intending to just make them surface, but the Soviet sub interpreted it as an attack, and were one vote away from replying with a nuclear-tipped torpedo. Another example: the US military was very seriously considering invading the island of Cuba, not knowing that the Soviets had actually transferred many dozens of tactical nuclear weapons there, and that the Cubans and local Soviet forces were planning to use them in such an event. Any such activity could have easily escalated to major war, and nuclear war. In both of these situations, we have possible American miscalculations leading towards a low-level nuclear reply, with unknown consequences.
  
  
• 1983, the Able Archer exercises. On the heels of very militaristic American language, NATO and the US ran a full-scale mock war situation in Western Europe, flying very close to the Soviet borders. What they did not realize is that the Soviets were terribly afraid of an American first-strike attack, and thought the exercise might be in fact one flying under a benign cover. Any accidents or mishaps, or even just misinterpretations of data by the USSR, could easily have led to some kind of nuclear altercation (probably low level, initially), which could have escalated. (1983 is also the year that Stanislav Petrov may have averted nuclear war by disregarding the incorrect results of a Soviet early warning system.)
  
  In general, both of these situations share common characteristics. Both involve moments of jitteriness, compounded by physical proximity, mixed with the common human problems of crossed signals, mistrust, and over-reliance on low-level military officers to make decisions that would affect the whole nation if done poorly. They are also characterized by inadequate intelligence: the US thought it knew what had (and had not) been transferred to Cuba in 1962, but in reality there were many more nukes there than they realized, for example. In 1983, the US poorly understood the Soviet mindset with regards to the NATO exercises.
  
  It is hard to determine which of the above cases is worse, in my mind. What makes the 1983 case potentially worse is in that both sides were much more nuclear-armed than in 1962 (where the US had many more arms than the USSR), and the delivery systems were at a point where both were in a use-it-or-lose-it situation (that is, they were fast and accurate, and so if the other side launched a surprise attack first, they could wipe out your nuclear assets very quickly unless you too replied in kind — and with very little time to make that call). But more to the point, in 1983 the United States was, in retrospect, remarkably ignorant of how jangled the Soviets were feeling, and did things that to the US looked like regular military exercises, but to the Soviets looked like a preliminary for a surprise nuclear attack. The Americans were shocked to find out, later, that the Soviets were taking the harsh militaristic language (which was really just for a domestic political audience, anyway) seriously. This kind of miscalculation is more fundamental than technical errors: it is about the way in which deterrence ultimately devolves down to human psychology in complex and very individual ways.
  
  On the Cuban Missile Crisis, see Michael Dobbs, _One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War; on the 1983 war scare, see David Hoffman, The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy_.
  
  There were, arguably, other "close calls" — accidents, bad early warning signals, mishaps. But the above two are generally regarded as the closest with regards to full nuclear war, because of the likelihood of escalation and all-out attack.

We do know why they're happening.

Have you ever read a history book? Generally speaking every single discussion* they ever had required a "note taker" and it's our custom to speak about these decisions a couple decades after. Obviously the whole truth isn't out there, and certainly not everyone tells the truth. But the motives behind everything I mentioned were clear as day.

I would encourage you to read books like

http://www.amazon.com/Legacy-Ashes-The-History-CIA/dp/0307389006

http://www.amazon.com/Osama-Bin-Laden-Michael-Scheuer/dp/0199898391

http://www.amazon.com/One-Minute-Midnight-Kennedy-Khrushchev/dp/1400078911

These men aren't all powerful, they don't take orders from some homogenous group that always retains the same position. And most importantly the information our leaders are given is often woefully inaccurate. The president more than anyone has the information that he is presented to him manipulated. Although some certainly have been more savvy than others.

One Minute to Midnight Not sure how scholarly this book is, but I read it, and it has perspective from all three sides of the conflict.

Well I just ordered Spy Handler: Memoir of a KGB Officer which is about the spy who recruited Aldrich Ames after a recommendation from a friend.

Some that I have found recommendations from on other subreddits include:

• One Minute to Midnight
  
• The Dead Hand
  
• Betrayal: The Story of Aldrich Ames, an American Spy

No, this was a separate incident, detailed in One Minute to Midnight. This occurred during the Cuban Missile Crisis. I'm sorry that I can't recall the name of the pilot at the moment. It was declassified after the end of the cold war.

One Minute to Midnight by Michael Dobbs was an epic slog of a book. It just seems like the author over-researched for the book and just said 'screw it' and jammed every tid bit of information into it. It offers a very detailed look at basically every tiny aspect of the Cuban missile crisis.

Yeah. While the Russians developed the first ICBMs, technically (The R7), it was impractical as a weapon. And while Khrushchev claimed that the USSR was rolling out missiles "like sausages", the reality is that they barely had any in the early 60s.

The R7 was replaced with new developments like the R16 (Which was the first really functional ICBM for the USSR), and by the late 60s-early 70s, the gap had closed enough that MAD was a real thing. But in 1962, the USSR would have been blown off the face of the earth. The US would have been hurt, but probably would have survived.

Source: Mostly from Red Moon Rising, and One Minute to Midnight. Pop-History, but both really good books, and well worth reading.

>Basically us demands offensive missiles to be taken back. Negotiations. Russia says ok. Setup a Russia - US hotline. Doesn't sound very traumatic.

What? Jesus. No. That's all you got from it? The world came dangerously close to nuclear war and it was only thanks to the thinking of some very smart, level-headed men and a bit of luck that we're even here today.

Perfect example -- Google Khrushchev's second letter. (EDIT: Actually, this is a pretty good link on it.) Kennedy ignored it instead of getting antagonized even more. Do you really think Trump could do the same?

Finally, and I'm not meaning this as a slight against you -- but they really don't teach this in school anymore? If not, I strongly recommend you read One Minute to Midnight by Michael Dobbs. Read it and imagine Trump in Kennedy's shoes. And then imagine if we would seriously be here today.