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

In October 1962, at the height of the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union came to the brink of nuclear conflict ove the deployment of Soviet missiles to Cuba.  Michael Dobbs has pored over previously untapped American, Soviet and Cuban sources to provide the most authoritative book yet on the Cuban missile crisis.  In his hour-by-hour chronicle of those near-fatal days, Dobbs reveals some startling new incidents that show how close we came to Armageddon.

Here for the first time, are gripping accounts of Khrushchev's plan  to destroy the U.S. naval b ase at Guantanamo; the accidental overflight of the Soviet Union by an American spy plane; the movement of Soviet nuclear warheads around Cuba during the tensest days of the crisis; the activities of CIA agents inside Cuba; and the crash landing of an American F-106 jet with a live nuclear weapon on board.

Dobbs take us inside the White House and the Kremlin as Kennedy and Khrushchev--rational, intelligent men separated by an ocean of ideological suspicion--agonize over the possibility of war.  Castro lives up to the slogan of the Cuban revolution, "Patria o Muerte" (Fatherland or Death), urging Khrushchev to consider a nuclear first strike against the United States. As the story unfolds, Dobbs brings us onto the decks of American ships patrolling Cuba; inside sweltering Soviet submarines and missile units as they ready their warheads; and onto the streets of Miami, as anti-Castro exiles plot the dictator's overthrow.

Research Trip to Cuba

Bourne screenwriter George Nolfi ("Adjustment Bureau") selected as director/screenwriter for Hollywood version of One Minute to Midnight

WHAT THEY SAID

"Filled with insights that will change the views
of experts and help inform a new generation"
Richard Holbrooke,  New York Times

"Evokes novelists like Alan Furst, John Le Carre, and Graham Greene" Washington Post

"Extraordinary...As gripping as any fiction."
Christian Science Monitor

"A gripping, moment-by-moment account of the crisis. The best one I've read." Fareed Zakaria, CNN.

"I didn't think there was another thing one could write about the Cuban missile crisis, but this is so well done." Madeleine Albright.

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Los Angeles Times
Book Award finalist

NPR review of
One Minute to Midnight

Michael Dobbs on NPR Diane Riehm

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USIP Special Report:
"Why we should still study the Cuban missile crisis"

New revelations about the Cuban missile crisis:
 National Security Archive

FOREIGN POLICY MISSILE CRISIS BLOG