October 27, 1962, a day dubbed Black Saturday in the Kennedy White House. The Cuban missile crisis is at its height, and the world is drawing ever closer to nuclear apocalypse.
As the opposing Cold War leaders, John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev, mobilise their forces to fight a nuclear war on land, sea and air, the world watches in terror. In Bobby Kennedy's words, 'There was a feeling that the noose was tightening on all of us, on Americans, on mankind, and that the bridges to escape were crumbling.'
In One Minute to Midnight Michael Dobbs uses a wealth of unseen archival material to tell both the human and the political story of Black Saturday, taking the reader into the White House, the Kremlin and along the entire Cold War battlefront.
Dobbs's thrilling narrative features a cast of characters - including Soviet veterans never before interviewed by a Western writer - with unique stories to tell, witnesses to this crucial moment in twentieth-century history.
Praise for ONE MINUTE TO MIDNIGHT:
'A riveting, hour-by-hour account of one day that could have changed the history of humanity' Joanna Bourke, The Times
'Excellent... [Dobbs] has made extensive use of untapped archive material to reveal the secrets of the cloak-and-dagger operations behind the nuclear stand-off' John Crossland, Daily Mail
'A book with sobering new information, as well as contemporary relevance ... filled with insights that will change the views of experts' Richard Holbrooke, former US Ambassador to the UN, New York Times Book Review
'A compelling - and thrilling - new study ... There is much new material that forces us to revise our assumptions about the crisis' Christopher Silvester, Daily Express