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

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Few events in history have been as studied and analyzed as the Cuban missile crisis. The thirteen days in October 1962 when the human race had its closest ever brush with nuclear destruction have been examined in countless magazine articles, books, television documentaries, treatises on presidential decision making, university lecture courses, conferences of former Cold War adversaries, and even a Hollywood movie. Yet remarkably, given this torrent of words, there is still no minute-by-minute account of the drama in the tradition of The Longest Day or Death of a President.

Most books on the crisis are either memoirs or scholarly studies, devoted to one particular facet of a vast and complicated subject. Somewhere in this wealth of academic literature the human story has been lost: a twentieth-century epic that witnessed one of the greatest mobilizations of men and equipment since World War II, life-and-death decisions made under enormous pressure, and a cast of characters ranging from Curtis LeMay to Che Guevara, all with unique stories to tell.

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