Former Harvard Professor Jorge Dominguez Reviews the book: 'Abyss: The Cuban Missile Crisis 1962' by Max Hastings

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https://doi.org/10.1007/s12115-023-00814-3
BOOK REVIEW
Max Hastings, Abyss: The Cuban Missile Crisis 1962
William Collins, 2022, 538 pp., ISBN: 978-0-06-298013-7
Jorge I. Domínguez1
© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2023
In 2022, six decades after the 1962 Cuban missile crisis,
Russian Federation President Vladimir Putin threatened to
use nuclear weapons during the war he had unleashed on
Ukraine. Just prior to the invasion, Deputy Foreign Minis-
ter Sergei Ryabkov opined that Russia could dispatch mili-
tary units to Cuba and Venezuela to counter US support for
Ukraine. The Cuban missile crisis remains pertinent.
Max Hastings’s lucid and well-written book aims to inform
a broad public. As a writer based in England, he brings a
keen sensibility for British views and European perspectives
during the crisis. His book draws on the well of many years
of scholarly research regarding the crisis and, especially, on
the endless trove of declassified US government documents
dealing with it, a smaller set of Soviet sources, and a few from
Cuba. Based on them, Hastings tells the gripping story of a
world at the edge of thermonuclear war. The book presents its
arguments through the intricate narrative of the crisis, which
the author makes accessible to us.
It opens with an extensive Prologue on the Bay of Pigs
invasion in April 1961, making the point forcefully that the
1962 Cuban missile crisis was, indeed, about Cuba. Cuban
Prime Minister Fidel Castro had reason to fear US military
attack and thus to seek Soviet military support. Soviet Prime
Minister Nikita Khrushchev had reasons to back his Cuban
ally, a successful revolution that owed nothing to prior
Soviet support but became a communist regime. Khrush-
chev cared about Cuba (p.144). He was also interested in
enhancing Soviet military capacity—a point character-
istically stressed by US decision makers in 1962 and US
scholars ever since—but Cuba never dropped from his list
of motivations. Khrushchev’s concern over Cuba provided
one key to the final settlement of this crisis.
Cuba also mattered deeply for President John F. Ken-
nedy and his brother, the attorney general and closest presi-
dential confidant, Robert F. Kennedy. John Kennedy’s 1960
presidential campaign featured his demands for a tougher
US policy against Castro. Kennedy authorized the Bay of
Pigs invasion. He also authorized “Operation Mongoose,”
a sabotage operation against Cuban military and civilian
installations, part US-sponsored state terrorism, part “risibly
incompetent” comic opera (p. 207). And Kennedy author-
ized assassination plots against Fidel Castro, which would
continue until 1965. The Cuban missile crisis was not just
about the world balance of power but, yes, about Cuba.
Second, making admirable use of his European perch,
Hastings reminds readers that the UK and Western Europe
had lived with the threat of Soviet nuclear weapons and con-
ventional forces in their “backyard” for the two previous dec-
ades. From their perspective, Soviet nuclear weapons in Cuba
lacked strategic significance. Hastings also cites the views of
Defense Secretary Robert McNamara who, since the start of
the crisis, noted that it mattered little strategically whether a
nuclear weapon was fired from here or there (pp. 223, 451).
The driving concern for US leaders was domestic US politics
and the perception of the US worldwide reputation. Thus,
the missiles in Cuba mattered more for those two political
reasons than for the strategic balance of global power.
Some scholars have contested the alleged irrelevance
of strategic concerns during the crisis, a disagreement that
Hastings does not bring out. The USSR had many fewer
missiles than the USA, and Soviet missiles were technically
less precise. Locating missiles and nuclear warheads in Cuba
significantly shortened the response time between the order
to launch and the missile’s impact. Such deployment also
increased the likelihood that the incoming missile would hit
its intended target.
Third, the core of the book is the analytical narrative of
the process of decision-making in the so-called executive
committee that President Kennedy assembled to advise him
* Jorge I. Domínguez
Dominguezjie1960@gmail.com
1
Harvard University, Cambridge, USA

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on a course of action. Hastings salutes the members of the
ExComm for changing their minds, often multiple times,
during the 13 days of discussion, remaining open to new
evidence and to the arguments heard in the room (p. 192).
He pays rightful tribute to the president:
He adopted a strategy that emphasized his own and
the nation’s resolve, while rejecting courses that might
have precipitated Armageddon. His remarkable gifts as
a listener were seen to utmost advantage in the meet-
ing of Excomm at the White House, which concluded
with clear, rational executive decisions. Against the
instincts not only of the military but of much domestic
opinion, almost from the outset he determined to strike
a bargain with the Soviets. He expected to pay a price
in order to secure peacefully his unwavering objective
– removal of the missiles from Cuba (p. 452).
Fourth, the only ones who did not change their minds,
regardless of new arguments and evidence, were the US Joint
Chiefs of Staff. To varying degrees, the top military leader-
ship was chomping at the bit to invade Cuba, overthrow the
Castro regime, and bloody the noses of the Soviet military
and leadership, oblivious to the costs of their approach com-
pared to plausible alternatives, such as the one eventually
adopted: a blockade (“quarantine”) of Cuba to buy time for
Soviet leaders to think again and pull back.
“Nonetheless,” writes Hastings, “it seems necessary reluc-
tantly also to recognize that Pentagon bellicosity, well-known
in the Kremlin, constituted a significant weapon in the presi-
dent’s Crisis armory” (p. 456). The Soviet leadership under-
stood the Joint Chiefs’ readiness for war and the superior
military capacity of US forces. The closer the crisis came to
war, the sharper the fear of war and defeat that Khrushchev
and his associates felt. The Soviet Union was compelled mili-
tarily to retreat. Appearing irrational, as the Joint Chiefs did,
was a key for successful deterrence and compulsion.
Next, Khrushchev’s behavior, according to Hastings,
was “the negation of statesmanship” (p. 132). Khrushchev
acted impulsively, irresponsibly, and with little forethought
about the consequences of his actions. There was no “con-
sidered, coherent Soviet strategy” (p. 151). The missiles and
warheads were to be deployed in secrecy to fool the USA.
The folly of this approach was clear not just because the
USA spotted the deployment but also because the deliber-
ate deception, sustained during the crisis, infuriated the US
leadership and delayed the crisis’s resolution.
I differ from Hastings’s assessment. Khrushchev’s ploy
was indeed irresponsible folly, but he was the only leader
who changed his mind fully during the crisis and reversed
his decision. Kennedy’s assault on the Castro regime in
Cuba—including pursuing Operation Mongoose sabotage
in Cuba even during the crisis (p. 356)—was also reckless.
The Kennedy brothers’ obsession with Cuba continued. On
the same day John Kennedy was assassinated, a CIA agent
gave a poison pen to a high Cuban government official to be
used to assassinate Castro.1
In contrast with such obduracy
and repeated encounters with futility, Khrushchev’s eventual
understanding of the crisis he had provoked, his manage-
ment of his domestic politics with fellow members of the
Presidium, and his public acceptance of his defeat suggest
more than a flicker of statesmanship.
Finally, Hastings has a mixed assessment of Fidel Castro
who “at the outset displayed greater wisdom than Khrushchev,
by urging Moscow to deploy the missiles openly through an
announced agreement” to parallel similar US agreements with
NATO partners (p. 151). The USA would still have raged
against the deployment, but the diplomacy of the crisis and
the management of US relations with its allies would have
been more challenging. As the crisis unfolded, however, Hast-
ings’s view of Castro understandably shifts. At a key moment
during the crisis, Castro wrote to Khrushchev to advocate for
a conditional first-strike nuclear launch. In the event of a US
conventional-force invasion of Cuba, Castro recommended,
the Soviet Union should launch a nuclear weapons attack on
the USA. His island would have been incinerated in the result-
ing nuclear exchange, but he seemed ready to take responsibil-
ity of his people’s destruction—“an absence of fear of nuclear
war unworthy of any human being” (p. 372).
The convoluted discussions and negotiations led to
varying outcomes, some clear in this book, others less so.
The Soviet Union agreed to dismantle its deployment to
Cuba (though several thousand Soviet conventional troops
remained) and redeploy all the missiles and warheads back
to its homeland (p. 430). The USA pledged not to invade
Cuba (a key Khrushchev motivation) provided the Soviet
Union withdrew their weapons systems “under appropri-
ate United Nations observation and supervision” (p. 414).
The USA agreed to withdraw its Jupiter missiles from Tur-
key, which the Pentagon characterized as having no stra-
tegic value, “as a voluntary act by the US, independent of
a publicly-acknowledged Cuban settlement… which would
become instantly void if the Russians disclosed it” (pp. 394,
415). Khrushchev had to explain to his Presidium that the
trade he had told them hours earlier (Cuba x Turkey mis-
siles) was not on the table; they had to approve a deal with-
out it. Khrushchev would be ousted in 1964, but in October
1962 he prevailed. The world could breathe, yes, from this
act of statesmanship.
In the crisis’s immediate aftermath, the USA seemed
to have secured a spectacular victory. Indeed, it did. It
succeeded at its key objective to dismantle the Soviet
1
US Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations
with respect to Intelligence Activities, “Alleged Assassination Plots
Involving Foreign Leaders,” An Interim Report 94th. Cong. 1st sess.
(Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1975), p. 174.

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deployment in Cuba. However, others succeeded too. In
1988, National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy wrote
that Khrushchev “had saved much from the shipwreck of his
bold venture” (p. 430). The US dismantled the Jupiter mis-
siles in Turkey. Cuba’s communist regime survived longer
than the Soviet Union. Castro remained in power longer
than anyone else at the time of the crisis. He raged for years
against Khrushchev’s betrayal of their personal bond and
their alliance; he had not been consulted in advance about
the decision to withdraw the weapons. Castro hated the
settlement. Yet, in 1975, at the First Congress of Cuba’s
Communist Party, he acknowledged publicly that the Soviet
Union had been correct. The settlement was a key reason for
his regime’s survival.
The book makes other processes and outcomes less clear.
During November 1962, a different crisis evolved between
Cuba and the Soviet Union. Castro attempted to block those
parts of the US-Soviet settlement that were within his reach.
Hastings describes how Soviet Deputy Prime Minister Ana-
stas Mikoyan was dispatched to Cuba, where he engaged in
tense and prolonged negotiations—not returning to Moscow
for his wife’s funeral—until he secured Castro’s consent to
the settlement (pp. 445–446), saving the peace.
One thread from those Soviet-Cuban exchanges was the
last Soviet proposal to settle the crisis, a date past when
Hastings’s narrative stopped. On January 9, 1963, Presi-
dent Kennedy met with Soviet First Deputy Foreign Min-
ister Vasily Kuznetsov, who proposed “a tripartite protocol
in which the head of the Cuban government would have
obliged himself … not to interfere with the internal affairs
of other countries.”2
Cuba’s “export of revolution” had
been a major US concern since 1959, yet Kennedy rejected
this offer because he “was not concerned with Cuba but
with the Soviet military presence there.” In shutting this
door, Kennedy undermined his own public policy prefer-
ence to stop Cuba’s support for insurrectionists in other
countries, a goal that the Soviet Union was proposing to
help him achieve.
One consequence of Castro’s refusal to accept United
Nations onsite inspection was that the no-invasion pledge
did not become operational in 1962 (contrary to Hast-
ings on p. 460). The Kennedy administration’s ongoing
attempts to overthrow Castro through overt sabotage
and trade and other sanctions were consistent with this
pledge’s invalidity. In a twist of history not in this book,
the no-invasion pledge became operational only in 1970
when a further negotiation regarding Soviet military pres-
ence took place. National Security Adviser Henry Kiss-
inger informed President Richard Nixon correctly that
“the agreement was never explicitly completed because
the Soviets did not agree to an acceptable verification sys-
tem (because of Castro’s opposition) and we never made
a formal non-invasion pledge.” Nevertheless, the new
1970 settlement, according to Kissinger, “prohibit[ed]
the emplacement of any offensive weapons of any kind
or any offensive delivery system on Cuban territory. We
reaffirmed that in return we would not use military force
to bring about a change in the governmental structure
of Cuba.”3
Belatedly, Khrushchev and Castro succeeded.
On a major point, Hastings is devastatingly clear. In
1962, nuclear war could have broken out as a result of
“military accidents,” that is, a hot-headed over-zealous
military commander could have started a shooting war,
soon escalated to a nuclear confrontation. Most seriously,
the Soviet leadership gave substantial discretion over the
use of tactical nuclear weapons to the commander of Soviet
forces in Cuba, retracted only as the crisis became more
intense. But the most frequent threats of confrontation were
between forces at sea as well as the shootdown of a US U-2
espionage flight over Cuba, killing its pilot.
Yet, Hastings is correct that the “menace to the planet
was not that the Russians would purposefully launch a
First Strike against the US, but instead that the Americans,
provoked at their most sensitive point, would consider
that the missile deployment justified devastating military
action against Cuba.” His reconstruction of the tenor and
content of discussions in the White House and, especially,
in the Pentagon justify his claim.
Therefore, as true for 1962 as for today, with uncom-
fortable echoes of the Cuban Missile Crisis during Rus-
sia’s war on Ukraine, Hastings ends his book hoping “that
no national leader shows themselves deficient in the fear
which must lie at the heart of wisdom, and which was
indispensable to a peaceful resolution of the Cuban Mis-
sile Crisis”—a fear that bonded Kennedy and Khrushchev
to the benefit of world peace (p. 479).
Publisher's Note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to
jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Reviewer: Jorge I. Domínguez taught at Harvard University from
1972 to 2018, when he retired as the Antonio Madero Professor for
the Study of Mexico. He is an author of many books and articles on
Cuba and international relations, including To Make a World Safe
for Revolution: Cuba’s Foreign Policy (1989).
2
US Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United
States, 1961–1963. Volume XI. Cuban Missile Crisis and
Aftermath.(Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office,
1996), p. 662.
3
Henry Kissinger, White House Years (Boston: Little, Brown, 1979),
pp. 632–634.