Gambling with Armageddon

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer comes the first effort to set the Cuban Missile Crisis, with its potential for nuclear holocaust, in a wider historical narrative of the Cold War--how such a crisis arose and why, at the very last possible moment, it never happened.

In this groundbreaking look at the Cuban Missile Crisis, Martin Sherwin not only gives us a riveting, sometimes hour-by-hour explanation of the crisis itself; he also explores the origins, scope, and consequences of nuclear weapons' evolving global importance following World War II. By mining new sources and far surpassing the breadth of his earlier works, Sherwin shows how the volatile Cuban Missile Crisis was both integral to the wider Cold War and a consequence of nuclear arms. Gambling with Armageddon looks in particular at the Truman Administration's original debate regarding the atomic bomb; how President Eisenhower relied on the threat of massive retaliation to project US power in the early Cold War era; and how President Kennedy, though unprepared for the Bay of Pigs debacle, came of age during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Here, too, is a clarifying picture of Khrushchev's Soviet Union and how Khrushchev's installment of missiles in Cuba, at Castro's behest, triggered what would become a critical face-off between the USSR and the United States. Martin Sherwin has spent his career studying nuclear weapons and how they have shaped our world. Gambling with Armegeddon is an outstanding capstone to his work thus far.