One Minute To Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War

Michael Dobbs

sept 2008 · Random House

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October 27, 1962, a day dubbed Black Saturday in the Kennedy White House. The Cuban missile crisis is at its height, and the world is drawing ever closer to nuclear apocalypse.

As the opposing Cold War leaders, John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev, mobilize their forces to fight a nuclear war on land, sea and air, the world watches in terror. In Bobby Kennedy's words, 'There was a feeling that the noose was tightening on all of us, on Americans, on mankind, and that the bridges to escape were crumbling.'

In One Minute to Midnight Michael Dobbs brings a fresh perspective to this crucial moment in twentieth-century history. Using a wealth of untapped archival material, he tells both the human and the political story of Black Saturday, taking the reader into the White House, the Kremlin and along the entire Cold War battlefront.

Dobbs's thrilling narrative features a cast of characters - including Soviet veterans never before interviewed by a western writer - with unique stories to tell, witnesses to one of the greatest mobilizations of men and equipment since the Second World War.

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Michael Dobbs is a reporter for the Washington Post, who devoted much of his journalistic career to covering the collapse of communism. He was the Post's bureau chief in Warsaw (1980-82), Paris (1983-86) and Moscow (1988-1993). He has held fellowships at Harvard and Princeton University and is the author of three books: Down with Big Brother (1996), Madeleine Albright (1999) and Saboteurs (2004). Down with Big Brother was a runner-up for the 1997 PEN award for non-fiction.