Be afraid... because the spectre of a new Cuban Crisis has never loomed larger

Abyss: The Cuban Missile Crisis 1962 Max Hastings William Collins £30 ★★★★☆

What a relief that you are reading these words. It means we have survived another day. The threat of incineration in a Russian nuclear attack is still there, although the buttons have not been pressed. Life goes on. But we are nervous, and rightly so.

Until this year, a book about the Cuban Missile Crisis was a work of history. Of course, it still is – the besuited chain-smoking characters staring out from black-and-white photographs – but suddenly, after Ukraine was invaded, the distant sound of thunder, comforting when far away, is now a tad too close again for comfort. Cuba has become history with attitude: a tale for our time.

And boy, can Max Hastings tell a tale. Abyss grips from the get-go. Even if you know the story – and let’s face it, the story has been often told – the moments in which the world teetered on the brink of total annihilation after Russian nuclear missiles were dispatched to America’s back yard are worth hearing about again.

Partly because, in Hastings’s hands, they come alive as they would if this were the very best fiction: the vanity of the politicians, the recklessness and foolishness of many of the advisers. The thuggery of the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. The gung-ho way in which senior US military types pondered how they might win a nuclear war.

But in our troubled era, there is a new reason to think about the events of 1962. The ghosts of the Cuba Crisis are looking down from their heavenly perches (or up from the other place) and holding their breath: ‘Are they going to blow it this time?’

One striking similarity between the Cuba Crisis and Ukraine seems to be the run-up. Hastings takes us through the disastrous and hubristic Bay of Pigs fiasco in which President Kennedy, riding the luck that had never before deserted him, sent a bunch of illequipped Cuban emigrés to overthrow President Castro.

When the mission fell apart, Hastings writes, ‘Kennedy’s limp acceptance of defeat confirmed Khrushchev’s belief that the young president was green, weak, ripe for bullying. A Kremlin mindset was established for what would follow a year later’. Joe Biden is not young and not green. But did the Afghan retreat last year, disorderly and dishonourable as it seems to have been, suggest to Putin that this president was amply ripe for bullying?

We will almost certainly never know, but Hastings’s book is a reminder of how visceral world affairs can be, how the cut of the jib of a world leader can impress or embolden his or her opponents. It really is a jungle out there. And Biden looks to many like a beast past his best.

Hastings is, on the other hand, a writer in the permanent prime of his time. He has written some of the finest popular histories of the 20th Century, and Abyss is up there with the best. It is packed full of mordant humour, perfectly pitched amid the lunacy of mankind facing imminent destruction and its fate being decided by some sweaty chaps – often brainy and barmy in equal measure – sleeping in camp-beds in the White House or in goodness knows what conditions in the Kremlin.

At one stage Harold Macmillan, Britain’s laid-back Tory Prime Minister, sends a minute to the Cabinet Office about which colleagues would take charge in the event of his incineration in the apparently fast-approaching nuclear exchange: ‘I agree the following – First gravedigger… Mr [Rab] Butler. Second gravedigger… Mr [Selwyn] Lloyd.’

An additional measure: Downing Street drivers were to be issued with four pennies so that they could use a public phone box in the event of a nuclear strike. ‘Pitiful’ is the word Hastings uses to describe the measures available to protect the public. But he adds that the British prided themselves throughout the crisis on their bleak realism. They knew that hardly anyone would survive.

Hastings points out that the Cuba Crisis measures remained in place in the UK until 1970. I am old enough to remember the ‘protect and survive’ advice of the 1970s. One of the questions raised by Hastings’s book is whether any thought is being given now to a new effort to keep the nation functioning in the event of a nuclear exchange. Perhaps not: the pretence would seem too foolish in this modern, more cynical age.

The book ends with our current predicament and the motto Hastings suggests might keep us all alive: Be Afraid. That, he says, is the rightful position for all national leaders. That fear, of the consequences of a nuclear exchange, is what led to both sides standing down in 1962.

Do Putin and President Xi of China have that fear? North Korea’s Kim Jong Un? Hastings is unsure. Ah well: we shall, over the course of the coming weeks and months, all find out.

Justin Webb presents Today on BBC Radio 4. His memoir of the 1970s, The Gift Of A Radio, is published by Penguin.