Christopher Andrew

Professor Christopher Andrew is Emeritus Professor of Modern and Contemporary History at Cambridge. His most recent book is The Secret World: A History of Intelligence. His next book (with Julius Green) is Stars and Spies: Intelligence Operations and the Entertainment Business

Wednesday

Christopher Andrew

Trump’s exit is an opportunity to ditch the nuclear ‘football’

From our UK edition

Among the most alarming episodes during Donald J. Trump’s tumultuous final weeks in the White House was an announcement by the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, on 10 January:  ‘This morning, I spoke to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff [General] Mark Milley to discuss available precautions for preventing an unstable president from initiating military hostilities or accessing the launch codes and ordering a nuclear strike.’ Almost half a century earlier, there had been a similar – though secret – alarm about another unstable president with his finger on the nuclear button.

Thursday

Christopher Andrew

The edge of destruction

From our UK edition

The world came closer to thermonuclear warfare during the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962 than ever before or since. Most Americans now aged between their late fifties and late sixties remember ‘duck and cover’ drills during the crisis which taught them to hide under school desks and adopt the brace position in case of nuclear attack. One man who at the time was a 13-year-old schoolboy in Buffalo, New York, told me how on the day after a drill, ‘I was sitting on the big yellow school bus thinking: Will I get home today? Am I going to die? Is this it? Just looking out the window at the world passing by and wondering...’.