The Abyss Quotes

“He was flying the maximum altitude profile, and by this time the U-2F had reached 72,500 feet. There was no contrail.”
― Max Hastings, The Abyss: Nuclear Crisis Cuba 1962

“the night of 13 October, two hours before take-off, Heyser began donning his pressure suit and painstakingly assembling his equipment. He finally climbed the ladder into his cockpit at Edwards half an hour ahead of midnight. After lifting into the night sky for the ‘Brassknob’ mission designated #3101, he maintained radio silence throughout the long run to Cuba, breathing 100 per cent oxygen. ‘He met the sun over the Gulf of Mexico, and flew over the Yucatán Channel before turning north to penetrate denied territory,’ wrote”
― Max Hastings, The Abyss: Nuclear Crisis Cuba 1962

“the 1960s, he found the right friends and the best enemies to suit the mood of the times. Tens of millions of people in Central and South America, groaning beneath the rule of dictatorships dependent upon US sponsorship, embraced the legend of Castro as their culture’s supreme freedom fighter, and in due course celebrated his comrade Che Guevara as its principal martyr.”
― Max Hastings, The Abyss: Nuclear Crisis Cuba 1962

“Navy RB-47 reconnaissance”
― Max Hastings, The Abyss: Nuclear Crisis Cuba 1962

“The longer I write historical narratives, the more chilled I become by the fog of ignorance in which governments make big decisions.”
― Max Hastings, The Abyss: Nuclear Crisis Cuba 1962

“scribbled lines from Andrew Marvell: ‘But at my back I always hear/Time’s winged chariot hurrying near’.”
― Sir Max Hastings, The Abyss: Nuclear Crisis Cuba 1962

“Again and again, governments have made world-shaking decisions based upon misinformation. The fallibility of giant state information-gathering machines bewilders historians, and all nations have regularly suffered from its consequences. Every sensible national leader listens to their intelligence chiefs, but none make critical judgements solely on the basis of their claims.”
― Max Hastings, Abyss: The Cuban Missile Crisis 1962

“John Hughes, special assistant to Defense Intelligence Agency director Lt. Gen. Joseph Carroll during the Crisis, wrote later that the greatest barrier to developing strategic warning is ‘the tendency of the human mind to assume that the status quo will continue … Nations do not credit their potential opponents with the will to make unexpected acts.”
― Max Hastings, Abyss: The Cuban Missile Crisis 1962

“Gen. Omar Bradley said on Armistice Day 1948: ‘We live in an age of nuclear giants and ethical infants, in a world that has achieved brilliance without wisdom, power without conscience.”
― Max Hastings, Abyss: The Cuban Missile Crisis 1962

“Projections about the nation’s fate in the event of war – and no one supposed for a moment that the UK might be spared, if the Soviet Union attacked the US – were then based on 1955 estimates that ten 10-megaton H-bombs would kill twelve million of the country’s forty-six million people, and incapacitate many more. A later 1964 estimate would have been more realistic: A Soviet attack, this stated, ‘would cause the United Kingdom to cease to exist as a corporate political entity’.”
― Sir Max Hastings, Abyss: The Cuban Missile Crisis 1962

“we must be open about our difficulties, if we are to overcome them. Unfortunately, however, we often create these difficulties for ourselves, then battle against them, and at last regard success in overcoming them as an achievement.”
― Sir Max Hastings, Abyss: The Cuban Missile Crisis 1962