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Gambling with Armageddon: Nuclear Roulette from Hiroshima to the Cuban Missile Crisis, 1945-1962
Top of the pile
92
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
88/100Critics
94/100Scholars
93/100Author:
Martin J. Sherwin
Publisher:
Knopf
Date:
October 13, 2020
From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Martin J. Sherwin comes the first effort to set the Cuban Missile Crisis, with its potential for nuclear holocaust, in a wider historical narrative of the Cold War--how such a crisis arose, and why at the very last possible moment it didn't happen.
What The Reviewers Say
... well-researched and reasoned.
Martin Sherwin provides fresh insights both [the Cuban missile crisis] and on the larger themes of war and society raised by MacMillan. Sherwin’s Gambling with Armageddon is actually two books in one. At heart, it is a revisionist retelling of the deliberations within the executive committee (ExComm) of the National Security Council, the select body established by President John F. Kennedy on October 16, 1962, to devise a muscular response to the Soviet deployment of nuclear-armed ballistic missiles in Cuba.
The author provides a more detailed backstory to the crisis than any previous history.
Grounded in an exceptional and up-to-date knowledge of the military, diplomatic, and individual components of American and Soviet politics, he speculates on the role played by chance and even dumb luck in the high-level chess game that was played out in October 1962, deftly summarizing the positions of those favoring an immediate military strike at the Russian missiles in Cuba, as opposed to less cataclysmic actions.
