IT IS 1965. THERMONUCLEAR missiles fired from Russia hit Kent. The local authorities are overwhelmed. There are not enough shelters; little water. Firestorms incinerate adults as swiftly as leaves on a summer bonfire. Firing squads line up to execute looters, while the seriously wounded are put out of their misery with a single shot to the head. When a young orphan is asked what he wants to be when he grows up, he looks straight at the camera and says: “I don't want to be nothin'”.

It was “just a story”, of course, but Peter Watkins's television docudrama, entitled The War Game, remains one of the most disturbing films on the Cold War that I have seen. When it was released in 1965, the BBC refused to allow the 48-minute docudrama to be broadcast on television. It was simply too horrifying.

That ostrich position was satirised in an early 1960s jingle entitled Miss Massive Retaliation, which went like this:

Blow my heart to little bits
Never, never call it quits
Mister, send your missile my way...
Conflagrate me, oh please do,
The man on top's got to be you.
Mister, send your missile my way.
That mushroom cloud is me,
It's only me in ecstasy.
Mister, send your missile my way!

We may laugh, but there was good reason to be frightened. Scientific modernity had taken on a distinctly menacing dimension with the dropping of the uranium and plutonium bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. The following year, John Hersey's popular Hiroshima (1946) forced readers to recognise that “It could happen to us!” But the real spark to nuclear terror came on September 24, 1949, when it was announced that the Soviet Union had tested an atomic bomb.

Then in November 1952, the first trial of the hydrogen bomb took place. The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation's war games of 1955, in which 335 nuclear bombs were (theoretically) released over Germany, brought the extent of expected destruction to everyone's attention, as did the first orbiting over America of the Soviet Sputnik two years later.

Finally, in 1962, Americans became aware of a dramatic rise in the probability of the Third World War, when Soviet missiles were spotted just 90 miles from Florida. America's monstrous nuclear advantage had failed to deter Nikita Khrushchev from installing missiles in Cuba. On “Black Saturday”, October 27, 1962, the world came close to nuclear apocalypse. The Cuban missile crisis placed the fate of humankind in the hands of people no one trusted: soldiers, scientists, and statesmen.

These men (and they are all men) are the subject of Michael Dobbs's book on the Cuban missile crisis. The countless books, documentaries, and conferences dedicated to that event are testimony to the fascination of imagining catastrophic destruction. Can this book - written by a reporter for The Washington Post not the British political thriller writer of the same name - tell us anything new?

Obviously Dobbs thinks so. He has interviewed Soviet veterans, drawn new maps, and fussily plotted more accurate positions of Soviet and American vessels. However, playing “spot what's original” is a rather tedious game and, I suspect, will be disappointing for anyone except the most obsessive JFK fan or war-gamer.

That is not where the real strength of this book lies. It is, quite simply, a riveting hour-by-hour account of one day that could have changed the history of humanity. We are led gently through early chapters focusing on the period of October 16-26. There are jaw-dropping quotations from leading military personnel, oozing a cavalier confidence in the power of their own military might.

Numerous perspectives are presented, including those of men holed up in claustrophobic submarines, Soviet troops frantically labouring to build the launch sites in time, and Cuban cold warriors on cloak-and-dagger missions. It is mesmerising stuff, all the way to the dramatic retreat when Khrushchev sent three messages: one to Kennedy (agreeing to the withdrawal of the missiles and grumbling about American behaviour), another to Fidel Castro (pleading with him “not to be carried away by sentiment”), and finally a brusque message to the commander of the Soviet Group of Forces on Cuba (insisting that they dismantle the R-12 missiles).

When the messages were eventually relayed, Kennedy thanked God that it was “all over”, while the generals at the Pentagon called it “the greatest defeat in our history” and Castro vented his anger by kicking a wall and smashing a mirror. On the streets of Cuba crowds gathered, shouting “Russians go home” and “Khrushchev is a queer”.

In One Minute to Midnight, Dobbs set himself the task of helping a “new generation of readers relive the quintessential Cold War crisis”. In this aim, he succeeds. However, his depiction of John F. Kennedy and Khrushchev as “flawed, idealistic, blundering, sometimes brilliant, often mistaken” men ultimately fails to answer the question of how we got into such a mess in the first place.

Extract

The nuclear strike codes were kept inside a black vinyl briefcase known as “the Football.” The Football enabled the President to order the obliteration of thousands of targets in the Soviet Union, China, and Eastern Europe. Within seconds of the authentication of a presidential order, missiles would lift off from silos on the plains of Montana and North Dakota; B-52 bombers heading toward Russia would fly past their failsafe points to their targets; Polaris submarines in the Arctic Ocean would unleash their nuclear warheads.

At first, Kennedy viewed the Football as just one more piece of presidential paraphernalia. But after a year in the White House, he started asking more pointed questions about its use ... He quizzed his military aide, General Chester “Ted” Clifton, about some of the details. He was interested, in particular, about the military officer who looked after the nuclear codes.

“The book says one of those men sits outside my bedroom door all night. Is that true?”

Clifton replied that the duty officer responsible for the Football remained downstairs in the office area, not upstairs in the residence.“He'll be upstairs - we've timed it many times; he can make it even if he has to run up the stairs and not use the elevator - in a minute and a half. If he knocks at your door some night and comes in and opens the valise, pay attention.”

One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev and Castro on the Brink of Nucleur War by Michael Dobbs
Hutchinson, £20 Buy the book here

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