In the book, One Minute to Midnight, Michael Dobbs takes us back to a time when the world came closer to nuclear destruction than ever before. The Cuban Missile Crisis is one of the best known and most dangerous moments in human history, when the U.S. and U.S.S.R. came one step away from a nuclear war. However the two leaders, U.S. President John F. Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, quickly recognized the devastating possibility of a nuclear war and used diplomacy to find a way out of this conflict. Eventually, the two leaders were able to cooperate and successfully avoid a nuclear crisis. Dobbs' analysis looks at how the politicians involved made strategic decisions to manage the conflict, preventing destruction and saving millions of lives. In conventional war, a leader can always recover from a bad strategic decision, but when nuclear weapons are involved the margin for error is very slim, which Kennedy understood when managing this crisis. According to Dobbs' account, the Cuban Missile Crisis is one of the best examples of how strategic decision-making in such a context can avoid all-out war and de-escalate conflict.
During the Cold War the U.S. had a huge nuclear advantage over the Soviets, with Jupiter ballistic missiles strategically aimed at the U.S.S.R. from Turkey Soviet medium-range missiles, in contrast, Soviet were only powerful enough to launch against Europe, while the missiles in Turkey were capable of striking the entire Soviet Union. Khrushchev was looking to respond to this U.S. action close to the Soviet border and wanted take the crisis to the U.S. border in turn. Khrushchev quoted "We Russians have suffered three wars over the last half century: World War I, the Civil War, and World War II. America has never had to fight a war on her own soil, at least not in the past fifty years. " (Dobbs, 47). Missiles began to arrive that summer under the tide of secrecy. Khrushchev planned to make the missile operational before the American discovered missiles were there.
