At the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, as the world teetered on the brink of all-out nuclear war, President John F Kennedy took inspiration from a book published earlier in the same year. Pressing The Guns of August on friends and colleagues (including the British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan), Kennedy implored them to study the account of the outbreak of the First World War and consider how disastrous miscalculations by well-meaning policymakers could inadvertently accumulate – with tragic global consequences.
Kennedy’s reading of the book was to shape profoundly his response to the Cuban Missile Crisis, through his careful calibration of risk and his appreciation of the motivations and concerns of the Soviet leadership under Nikita Khrushchev.
The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman provides a compelling account of the opening stages of the First World War. It focuses not on the experiences of combatants, but rather on the personalities, characteristics, and motivations of key politicians and generals of the major powers. In doing so, Tuchman aims to explore how a series of political and military decisions, often based on personal factors, faulty intelligence, or naïve assumptions, gradually escalated tensions to the outbreak of war.
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