This article is from Military History Matters issue 122
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A crisis over a small island south of the mainland United States in the autumn of 1962 was the closest the world ever came to a devastating nuclear war. Award-winning historian Serhii Plokhy, who recently chronicled the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, revisits this terrifying episode of Cold War drama, in which disaster was avoided thanks only to one very human emotion: fear.
Nuclear Folly: a new history of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Serhii Plokhy, Allen Lane, £25 (hbk), ISBN 978-0241454732.
