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Serhii Plokhy, Nuclear Folly: A History of the Cuban Missile Crisis. New York: W.W. Norton, 2021. xviii + 444 pp. (Cloth US $35.00)
After nearly 60 years, the Cuban missile crisis of October-November 1962 continues to attract the attention of scholars and the reading public alike, and for at least one very compelling reason: while historians are engaged in a fruitful debate about just how close it brought the world to nuclear annihilation, most agree about its extreme if not supreme gravity.
Serhii Plokhy's Nuclear Folly is a welcome addition to an already vast literature. Drawing on a wide range of international sources, especially those in Russian, Plokhy reinforces a growing trend toward balance as we learn more about Soviet and Cuban perspectives. In judiciously laying out the causes, course, and conclusion of the crisis, he presents a stark argument: far from being masters of their domains, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev and U.S. President John F. Kennedy "marched from one mistake to another" (p. xvi), fully in charge of neither the forces...