2/8: When the Kremlin backs down from the brink: 2/8: Nuclear Folly: A History of the Cuban Missile Crisis, by Serhii Plokhy

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🗓️ 26 June 2023

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2/8: When the Kremlin backs down from the brink: 2/8: Nuclear Folly: A History of the Cuban Missile Crisis, by Serhii Plokhy

https://www.amazon.com/Nuclear-Folly-History-Missile-Crisis/dp/0393540812/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=

Nearly thirty years after the end of the Cold War, today’s world leaders are abandoning disarmament treaties, building up their nuclear arsenals, and exchanging threats of nuclear strikes. To survive this new atomic age, we must relearn the lessons of the most dangerous moment of the Cold War: the Cuban missile crisis.

Serhii Plokhy’s Nuclear Folly offers an international perspective on the crisis, tracing the tortuous decision-making that produced and then resolved it, which involved John Kennedy and his advisers, Nikita Khrushchev and Fidel Castro, and their commanders on the ground. In breathtaking detail, Plokhy vividly recounts the young JFK being played by the canny Khrushchev; the hotheaded Castro willing to defy the USSR and threatening to align himself with China; the Soviet troops on the ground clearing jungle foliage in the tropical heat, and desperately trying to conceal nuclear installations on Cuba, which were nonetheless easily spotted by U-2 spy planes; and the hair-raising near misses at sea that nearly caused a Soviet nuclear-armed submarine to fire its weapons

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is CBS I On The World. I'm John Bachelors, and Sarah Heplokey's new book is Nuclear
0:08.5	Folly, a history of the Cuban Missile Crisis. We come to a moment, a pause, in the crisis
0:15.2	at hand in the White House, to ask Nikita Khrushchev, who was he at this moment? Professor,
0:22.8	by growing up in our growing up, Khrushchev was emphasized as something of a large clownish
0:30.0	character, banging issue with the United Nations. But he was bloody minded, he was successful,
0:35.8	he was a peasant, and he was a powerful actor, often telling crude proverbs, and overwhelming
0:42.5	the better educated and the more ideological prosidium. However, what was he to Jack Kennedy?
0:48.8	What was their history together that comes to this crisis in 62?
0:52.8	First of all, about Nikita Khrushchev, he was really mistook to be a clown by many people who
1:03.6	dealt with him. But the most important thing about Nikita Khrushchev is that he became
1:09.6	successor to Joseph Stalin. He's not only survived on the Joseph Stalin for decades, but he also
1:18.4	was able to outsmart and then eventually to kill the chief cigarette policeman of
1:27.6	Joseph Stalin, his name was Lover Antibiotta. So it was a very, very shrewd and experienced and
1:34.7	kind politician and political leader. And he believed that Jack Kennedy actually owed him his
1:44.2	presidential election, because he was sending the KGB officers to the headquarters of President
1:51.6	Kennedy, headed by that time by Robert Kennedy, offering help and assistance. So in today's
1:58.8	language, probably what's called this collusion. But if Khrushchev was misunderstood by many people,
2:06.4	he certainly misunderstood Jack Kennedy. He thought that he was a young and experienced as he was
2:14.2	young and an experienced, but that he could actually manipulate him and push him.
2:19.5	And this missile sput in the missiles on the Cuban soil was the moment when actually Kennedy
2:27.1	refused to back off, refused to compromise. And that took Kennedy by surprise. So when the
2:35.8	news arrived in Moscow, the President Kennedy was about to deliver his speech and in Moscow,
	...

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