“We’re in a more dangerous period now than at any point in my memory.” — Michael Dobbs
On 16 October 1962, exactly sixty-four years ago, photos of Soviet missiles on Cuba were shown to President Kennedy and the world faced nuclear Armageddon. The definitive account of that thirteen-day crisis, One Minute to Midnight, was written by today’s guest, the presidential crisis historian Michael Dobbs. He has now written about a crisis that few remember, but which he calls the climactic crisis of the Cold War.
It happened in 1983. In September of that year, the Soviets shot down a South Korean airliner with 269 people aboard, among them the most anti-communist member of the United States Congress. A few weeks later a Soviet early-warning computer reported that America had launched its missiles, and a colonel named Petrov, alone in a bunker at one in the morning, decided on his own authority that the machine was lying. In November NATO ran a nuclear release exercise called Able Archer, which Moscow took for the real thing.
The difference between 1962 and 1983, Dobbs says, was twenty years of technology. Kennedy had thirteen days. Reagan, by his own estimate in his memoirs, would have had six minutes. Thus the title of his new book, The Six Minute War, subtitled Reagan, Russia and the Race to Automate Armageddon.
As the incoming Moscow correspondent for the Washington Post, Dobbs had a front seat on the crisis. He arrived in Moscow just after the airliner came down, and his best material is anecdotal. He saw Russians bussed to a state-organised protest outside the American embassy, chanting on cue while jealously eyeing the Buicks and Cadillacs parked on the street. In a Moscow cinema showing Three Days of the Condor as anti-American propaganda, he watched the audience gasp — not at the dastardly CIA, but at the lavish contents of Robert Redford’s fridge.
Fast forward to today, and we get to the most worrying part of Dobbs’ analysis. The presidential crisis historian reckons we are now in a more dangerous period than at any point he can remember. We have more weapons, less warning, with our split-second decisions dependent on machines whose reasoning is increasingly hard for us humans to understand. Call the compounding annual risk one per cent. Multiply it across thirty years and the arithmetic isn’t reassuring. We might now be just a few seconds to midnight.
FIVE TAKEAWAYS
1. The headline is about now, not 1983. The historian of the Cuban Missile Crisis says this is a more dangerous period than any he remembers of the Cold War: more warheads, less warning time, and decisions migrating to machines nobody can audit.
2. What changed between 1962 and 1983 was twenty years of technology. Kennedy had thirteen days over Cuba. Reagan wrote that he might have six minutes to read a blip on a screen — which is where the title comes from. Dobbs is candid that no six-minute war occurred.
3. A Soviet colonel is why this is a book about automation. Petrov, alone at 1am with computers reporting an American launch, reasoned that nobody attacks with five missiles instead of two hundred, and called it a false alarm. Somebody else might not have.
4. Reagan was the most anti-nuclear president since 1945. The man denouncing the evil empire was also hunting Armageddon prophecies in the Bible, and later offered Gorbachev the abolition of nuclear weapons. Dobbs says both Reagans were real.
5. Nobody starts a nuclear war on purpose, which is the frightening part. The risk is an accident that escalates — a stray airliner, a faulty algorithm, an exercise misread. Andropov said as much to Averell Harriman. Dobbs’s answer is sensible leaders, open channels and empathy.
THE BOOK
The Six Minute War: Reagan, Russia, and the Race to Automate Armageddon (Simon & Schuster, out 20 October 2026) — https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Six-Minute-War/Michael-Dobbs/9781668052594
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Keen On America is a daily conversation about the ideas, books and arguments shaping the United States, hosted by Andrew Keen, author of The Internet Is Not the Answer and How to Fix the Future. New episodes every day.
CHAPTERS
00:00 — Intro
00:31 — Sixty-four years since the Cuban Missile Crisis
02:22 — 1962 versus 1983: twenty years of technology
05:12 — Arriving in Moscow after the airliner came down
07:24 — The gasps at Robert Redford’s fridge
08:39 — Chanting at the embassy, eyeing the Cadillacs
12:09 — The most anti-nuclear president since 1945
14:52 — Korean Air Lines Flight 007: how big a deal?
21:31 — The night the Soviet computers cried wolf
23:45 — Pershings, and six minutes to Moscow
26:13 — There was no six-minute war
29:49 — Yeltsin in an American supermarket
35:35 — Russia reverts to type
37:40 — Why Nixon comes out well
39:31 — Automating Armageddon
40:23 — More dangerous now than the Cold War
43:11 — The real risk is an accident
47:38 — Hubris, and the case for empathy
50:23 — The arithmetic of nonzero