Nuclear folly a history of the Cuban Missile Crisis

"A dramatic re-creation and urgent examination of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Nearly thirty years after the end of the Cold War, today's world leaders are abandoning disarmament treaties, building up their nuclear arsenals, and exchanging threats of nuclear strikes. To survive this new atomi...

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Main Author: Plokhy, Serhii, 1957- (Author)
Format: Books Print Book
Language: English
Published: New York, NY : W.W. Norton & Company, [2021]
Edition: First edition.
Subjects:
Summary: "A dramatic re-creation and urgent examination of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Nearly thirty years after the end of the Cold War, today's world leaders are abandoning disarmament treaties, building up their nuclear arsenals, and exchanging threats of nuclear strikes. To survive this new atomic age, we must return to the lessons of the most dangerous moment of the Cold War: the Cuban Missile Crisis. Nuclear Folly offers an international perspective on the crisis, tracing the tortuous decision-making that produced and then resolved it, involving John Kennedy and his advisers, Nikita Khrushchev and Fidel Castro, and their commanders on the ground. More often than not, the Americans and Soviets misread each other, operated under false information, and came perilously close to nuclear catastrophe. Despite these errors, nuclear war was avoided for one central reason: fear. Serhii Plokhy masterfully illustrates the drama and anxiety of those tense days, and provides a way for us to grapple with the problems posed in our present day"--
Physical Description: xviii, 444 pages, 8 unnumbered pages : illustrations, maps ; 25 cm
Bibliography: Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN: 9780393540819
0393540812
Author Notes: Serhii Plokhy , author of The Russo-Ukrainian War, Atoms and Ashes, and Nuclear Folly, is a professor of Ukrainian history and director of the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University. He is a leading authority on the history of the Cold War. He lives in Burlington, Massachusetts.