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Michael Dobbs is a journalist, and Alex Abella also writes for the newspapers, although he makes his living as a novelist. Each of them has published a popular history about America's influence as a superpower in the 20th century. Together the books promote reflection about how nation states behave and who is responsible for their behavior.
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The tale of the Missile Crisis has often been told. In the spring of 1962, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev decided to situate nuclear-tipped rockets, aimed at the United States, in Cuba. Under Fidel Castro, that island country had recently declared its allegiance to communism and had become an ally of the USSR. When the administration of John Kennedy learned about the missiles in the fall of 1962, Kennedy and his national security managers decided that the Russians had to remove the armaments—or else. In the next two weeks of October 1962, a watershed period in the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union came close to nuclear war. The narrative of the threats and counter-threats, deliberations, negotiations, and military posturing still makes for a great read. Dobbs has studied matters seriously and has some new information, mainly on the activities of the armed services. While he often proudly reminds us that this information has not been used before, his account is familiar, basically distinguished because Dobbs tells an outstanding story.
Good story or not, One Minute to Midnight adopts the unexceptional explanation of what went on. Dobbs argues that the world escaped harm for two reasons. First, Kennedy and Khrushchev were both reasonable men looking for a judicious way out of the crisis. Second, Dobbs allows, they both luckily avoided the unfortunate consequences of various accidents, miscommunications, and the deeds of uncommitted associates. It is this uncontroversial understanding that must be transcended.
Khrushchev was told that positioning missiles in Cuba would raise a firestorm in the United States. Why did he risk it? After World War II ended in Europe, the two great powers had partitioned Germany, but the western zone of that nation prospered more than the eastern, and Western Germany was soon formidably allied with the United States. The Russians feared growing West German strength, and as time went on dreaded that the West Germans would get nuclear devices. These issues centrally threatened the status quo in the fifteen years after 1945. Were the United States to endorse German nuclear weapons, the Russians might themselves resort to a pre-emptive strike. But the USSR had a standard move to signal its worries about West Germany. The old German capital of Berlin lay within East Germany, and the city too had been divided. An odd entity behind the lines, West Berlin was an exposed part of America's Cold War bloc. Every time the Russians wanted to show their anxiety about increased West German muscle, they attacked the status of West Berlin. Berlin crises defined much of the Cold War in Europe, and they intensified in the early 1960s as West Germany got closer to control of non-conventional bombs.
For a long time the Russians did not make their apprehensions explicit, and the Americans had only a clouded sense of Soviet concern. The United States did not seem to grasp why Russia was so disquieted about German possession of nuclear weapons. Well, Khrushchev seemed to say in strategic essence, let's see how the United States likes it when the USSR installs atomic rockets in Cuba. The Americans thought Fidel Castro was as rash as the Soviets thought the West Germans. As the communists were accustomed to urging, the "correlation of forces" had swung too heavily in the American favor; arms in Cuba would create a more equal correlation. Thus, from the point of view of individual ethics, Khrushchev made a dangerous choice.
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