Customer Reviews

Cuban Missile Crisis, 1962: A National Security Archive Documents Reader

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The National Security Archive's "The Cuban Missile Crisis, 1962" is not for everyone. The casual reader will find the declassified intelligence reports, minutes of meetings, and executive correspondence to be boring if not indecipherable. The more knowledgeable reader without specific background in the Cuban Missile Crisis may miss the importance of the many details revealed here. For the student of crisis management, for which the Cuban Missile Crisis is held to be a model example, this book is a goldmine of useful detail and context.

The standard history of the Cuban Missile Crisis, based on selective memoires by U.S. participants, is that Russia rather inexplicably placed ballistic missiles in Cuba in 1962. The resulting crisis was resolved when the United States faced down the Soviets in a dramatic confrontation that came close to nuclear war. A more nuanced version holds that President Kennedy traded US missiles in Turkey and a pledge not to invade Cuba in return for a Soviet withdrawal.

"The Cuban Missile Crisis, 1962" makes clear the crisis had long roots in US/Soviet rivalry and a much messier resolution. The documents indicate that US and Soviet decision-makers were operating with a dangerously incomplete understanding of each other. Soviet actions in Cuba become much clearer in a context of US actions in Europe and Cuba and the disparity in strategic forces. US counteractions are formulated in a tense atmosphere haunted by the supposed lessons of the Second World War and by the fear of igniting a third world war. The resolution of the crisis spun out long after the dramatic "thirteen days" in October 1962.

Authors Chang and Kornbluh provide the necessary connective narrative and include more recent commentary by participants, including the fact, not known at the time, that Soviet nuclear warheads were already in Cuba and could have been used in the event of a U.S. invasion.

This collection is very highly recommended to the student of crisis management and of the Cold War as an invaluable resource on the details of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

I purchased this book to use a source while writing my senior thesis in college. It has a vast amount of information with great detail. It's easy to use and was a wonderful purchase.

Plenty of comprensive data but the author should learn to write.
His style is so utterly awkward, he must be speaking some sort of oriental verse.
No wonder this book never sold. Way to dull a hill to climb.

Pretty god but boring, dont read if you are not interseted