Nuclear Folly

The Cuban missile crisis is retold from an international perspective in Serhii Plokhy's history, which traces the decision-making that produced the crisis and then resolved it. The cast includes John Kennedy and his advisers, Nikita Khrushchev, Fidel Castro and the commanders in the field, from Soviet troops trying to conceal nuclear installations on Cuba that U-2 spy planes spotted anyway to near misses at sea involving a Soviet nuclear-armed submarine. Plokhy argues that the Americans and Soviets more often than not misread each other and acted on false information, and that fear of mutual destruction is what kept the two sides from nuclear war. He draws on Soviet archives, including previously classified KGB documents, and on White House tapes.

Tyler Cowen named it one of the best non-fiction books of 2021 on Marginal Revolution.