Gambling with Armageddon : nuclear roulette from Hiroshima to the Cuban Missile Crisis, 1945-1962 / Martin J. Sherwin.
"From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer 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. In this groundbreaking look at the Cuban Missile Crisis, Martin Sherwin not only gives us a riveting sometimes hour-by-hour explanation of the crisis itself, but also explores the origins, scope, and consequences of the evolving place of nuclear weapons in the post WWII world. Mining new sources and materials, and going far beyond the scope of earlier works on this critical face-off between the United States and the Soviet Union -- triggered when Khruschev began installing missiles in Cuba at Castro's behest -- Sherwin shows how this volatile event was an integral part of the wider Cold War and was a consequence of nuclear arms. Gambling with Armageddon looks in particular at the original debate in the Truman Administration about using the Atomic Bomb; the way in which President Eisenhower relied on the threat of massive retaliation to project U.S. power in the early Cold War era; and how President Kennedy, though unprepared to deal with the Bay of Pigs debacle, came of age during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Here too is a clarifying picture of what was going on in Khruschev's Soviet Union. Martin Sherwin has spent his career in the study of nuclear weapons and how they haveshaped our world -- Gambling with Armegeddon is an outstanding capstone to his work thus far"-- Provided by publisher.
Record details
- ISBN: 9780307266880
- ISBN: 0307266885
- Physical Description: 604 pages, 16 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations, maps ; 25 cm
- Edition: First edition.
- Publisher: New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2020.
- Copyright: ©2020
Content descriptions
General Note: | "A Borzoi Book." |
Bibliography, etc. Note: | Includes bibliographical references (pages 553-569) and index. |
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Available copies
- 7 of 7 copies available at Missouri Evergreen. (Show)
- 1 of 1 copy available at North Kansas City.
Holds
- 0 current holds with 7 total copies.
Show Only Available Copies
Location | Call Number / Copy Notes | Barcode | Shelving Location | Status | Due Date |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
North Kansas City Public Library | 972.9106 SHERWIN 2020 (Text) | 0001002374682 | Nonfiction | Available | - |
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Gambling with Armageddon : Nuclear Roulette from Hiroshima to the Cuban Missile Crisis
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Excerpt
Gambling with Armageddon : Nuclear Roulette from Hiroshima to the Cuban Missile Crisis
Prologue In October 1962 I was a junior officer in the U.S. Navy attached to Patrol Squadron 31, an antisubmarine warfare (ASW) training unit based at North Island Naval Air Station. This was California, but from the prime San Diego real estate we inhabited, we looked across to "Florida," the elegant Hotel del Coronado, where Marilyn MonÂroe, Tony Curtis, and Jack Lemmon had ushered in the sixties with the film Some Like It Hot . 1 Despite my modest rank--I was the squadron's air intelligence officer--my responsibilities made me the custodian of our top-secret documents: our deployment orders in the event of war. Those orders were periodically updated, and when they were, a senior staff officer from Fleet Headquarters, always accompanied by an armed marine, arrived with a sealed envelope. A ritual followed: I signed for the new envelope, and he signed for the envelope that I removed from my top-secret safe, a miniature vault embedded in my large office safe. Except on these occasions, this inner sanctum was never unlocked. I had no expectation of ever learning what was in those envelopes (clippings from the New York Times , we joked), since they would be opened only in the event of a national emergency. On a date in mid-October that I cannot recall, I was informed by telephone that a new envelope would arrive at an appointed time. This was soon after I received the disappointing news that an around-the-world flight I was scheduled to co-navigate for an admiral was cancelled. Within days all leaves were revoked. According to ru mors at our local hangout, the Mexican Village, the cause was rising tenÂsions in Berlin. Although we were on the West Coast, a sense of being engaged in an international crisis permeated my squadron's ranks. Extra muniÂtions, and weapons we had never before stored, were delivered to our hangars. Friends at El Toro, the Marine Corps Air Station north of San Diego, told me that marines in full battle gear were being flown east aboard military air transports. Something important was hapÂpening, and we were going to be part of it. On Monday, October 22, before President Kennedy informed the world that he had ordered Cuba blockaded, I was directed to retrieve the top-secret plans from my safe and deliver them--with the obligatory armed marine escort--to my commanding officer. Our squadron's senior staff--the captain, the executive officer, and the operations officer--had assembled in the captain's office to review the war plans. My recollection is that we would deploy to an airfield in Baja California, Mexico. The rationale was to disperse military aircraft beyond the reach of Soviet missiles. Some junior officers--all of us bachelors--joked that the beaches of Baja "would be a delightÂful place to die." I did not know until I researched this book how close to death we had come. 2 A world away from Coronado, California, another junior officer, stationed at a strategic rocket facility nine hundred miles east of Moscow, opened an envelope not very different from the one I had delivered to my squadron's senior officers. Valery Yarynich, who was exactly my age, had a different reacÂtion to what he read. A junior officer and communications specialÂist, stationed at division headquarters in Kirov, his unit was the central command center for five intercontinental missile battalions. After President Kennedy's October 22 speech demanding that the Soviet Union remove its missiles from Cuba, Yarynich was deployed to a missile base in Siberia to help supervise command and control communications. "At the peak of the confrontation," he told the American journalÂist David Hoffman, he received a message containing the code-word "BRONTOZAVR." That was the combat-alert go code--the dreaded signal to open the top-secret communications envelopes and transiÂtion the R-7 liquid-fueled intercontinental ballistic missiles to war readiness. "I cannot forget," Yarynich recalled, "the mixture of nerÂvousness, surprise and pain on the faces of each operator, without exception--officers, enlisted men, women telephone operators." The unthinkable moment had arrived: Nuclear war was a mere press of a button away. It was the most devastating war in world history. The estimated number of North American deaths was upwards of 200 million. Double, perhaps even quadruple that number of Soviet, Eastern European, and Chinese citizens perished, and no one had any reliable data on how many WestÂern Europeans, Africans, Asians, South Pacific Islanders, and others the radioactive fallout killed as it circumnavigated the globe. Cuba became a wasteland, and there were few structures left standing in Moscow and Washington, DC. It was an unthinkable war, but not an unimagined one. In 1957 the Australian writer Nevile Shute described its denouement in his eerily tranquil apocalyptic novel On the Beach . Adapted for the screen by John Paxton and directed by Stanley Kramer, in 1959 On the Beach premiered simultaneously in major U.S. cities and Moscow, to reports of viewers sobbing as Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, Fred Astaire, and Anthony Perkins stoically prepared in Australia, where the movie is set, for the arrival of deadly radioactive clouds carrying the fallout from the nuclear war recently fought in the Northern Hemisphere. They were the last survivors of the human race, going quietly into endless night. 3 But the Cuban missile crisis did not replicate On the Beach, leaving thoughts of a Cuban missile war to pass into history. While particiÂpants in (and historians of) the crisis never tire of recalling its details and dangers, the majority of the generation that lived through it, and subsequent generations, never became emotionally engaged with its potential consequences. It was neither Vietnam nor Watergate--nor Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963. It was just the most devastating event in world history . . . that somehow didn't happen. That somehow is the subject of this book. Excerpted from Gambling with Armageddon: Nuclear Roulette from Hiroshima to the Cuban Missile Crisis by Martin J. Sherwin All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.