Gambling with Armageddon: Nuclear Roulette from Hiroshima to the Cuban Missile Crisis - Tapa blanda

Sherwin, Martin J.

 
9780307386335: Gambling with Armageddon: Nuclear Roulette from Hiroshima to the Cuban Missile Crisis
Tapa blanda
ISBN 10: 0307386333 ISBN 13: 9780307386335
Editorial: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2022

Sinopsis

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of American Prometheus 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 never happened.

“Fresh and thrilling.... A fascinating work of history that is very relevant to today’s politics.” —Walter Isaacson, bestselling author of The Code Breaker

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Martin J. Sherwin introduces a dramatic new view of how luck and leadership avoided a nuclear holocaust during the October 1962 Cuban missile crisis. Set within the sweep of the Cold War and its nuclear history, every chapter of this gripping narrative of the origins and resolution of history’s most dangerous thirteen days offers lessons and a warning for our time. Gambling with Armageddon presents a riveting, page turning account of the crisis as well as an original exploration of the evolving place of nuclear weapons in the Post-World War II world.

"Sinopsis" puede pertenecer a otra edición de este libro.

Acerca del autor

MARTIN J. SHERWIN, was University Professor of History at George Mason University and the author of A World Destroyed: Hiroshima and Its Legacies, winner of the Stuart L. Bernath and the American History Book prizes, and the coauthor, with Kai Bird, of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, which won the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 2006 as well as the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Duff Cooper Prize. He died in 2021.

Fragmento. © Reproducción autorizada. Todos los derechos reservados.

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 Mon­roe, 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 ten­sions in Berlin.
Although we were on the West Coast, a sense of being engaged in an international crisis permeated my squadron’s ranks. Extra muni­tions, 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 hap­pening, 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 delight­ful 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 reac­tion to what he read. A junior officer and communications special­ist, 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 journal­ist 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 transi­tion the R-7 liquid-fueled intercontinental ballistic missiles to war readiness. “I cannot forget,” Yarynich recalled, “the mixture of ner­vousness, 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 West­ern 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 partici­pants 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.

"Sobre este título" puede pertenecer a otra edición de este libro.

Editorial
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Año de publicación
2022
Idioma
Inglés
ISBN 10 
0307386333
ISBN 13 
9780307386335
Encuadernación
Tapa blanda
Número de páginas
640
Contacto del fabricante
no disponible
Persona responsable
gpsr@libri.de
gpsr@libri.de

Europaallee 1
Bad Hersfeld
36244
Alemania

Otras ediciones populares con el mismo título

9780307266880: Gambling with Armageddon: Nuclear Roulette from Hiroshima to the Cuban Missile Crisis

Edición Destacada

ISBN 10:  0307266885 ISBN 13:  9780307266880
Editorial: Knopf, 2020
Tapa dura