5/8: When the Kremlin backs down from the brink: 5/8: Nuclear Folly: A History of the Cuban Missile Crisis, by Serhii Plokhy
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 26 June 2023
⏱️ 13 minutes
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5/8: When the Kremlin backs down from the brink: 5/8: 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
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| 0:00.0 | This episode is brought to you by Royal London, the UK's largest mutual, life, pensions and investment company. |
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| 0:30.0 | This is CBS Eye on the World. Here's John Batchler. |
| 0:40.0 | The Cuban Missile Crisis. The crisis is at hand. It is October 22nd, 23rd in Moscow. |
| 0:49.0 | The Presidium meeting in the Kremlin, Nikita Kurshev, is the first secretary. |
| 0:54.0 | The others at the table are critical. I turn to Serhi Ploki, his new book Nuclear Folly, a history of the Cuban Missile Crisis, |
| 1:03.0 | using transcripts from the tape recordings that President Kennedy made of his meetings in the White House. |
| 1:10.0 | Using notes that were made at the Presidium meeting in Moscow, these two leaders of nuclear-tipped-powered countries are unaware what each other is saying |
| 1:20.0 | and their information is out of date and it's often misunderstood by both sides. |
| 1:25.0 | So we go now to the Presidium meeting, laid on the 22nd in Moscow. It's eight hours ahead of Washington. |
| 1:31.0 | They take a break in the middle of the evening. At this point, Professor Kurshev doesn't know what's going to happen, |
| 1:39.0 | but there's a man at the table who has an alternative all the way through these discussions about deploying missiles. His name is McCoyan. |
| 1:48.0 | He has a great deal of authority on his own because he's one of the original revolutionaries. Who is he? What do we need to know about him at this point? |
| 1:56.0 | And as this McCoyan is a very, very interesting figure. The one who survived at the very top of the Soviet pyramid, power pyramid, |
| 2:09.0 | as the member of the Presidium of Politburo from Vladimir Lenin to Lenin Breslin. He retired only in the 1960s. |
| 2:20.0 | Of course, that means that he is a very experienced politician, but most of all, he is an excellent diplomat. |
| 2:30.0 | And Kurshev himself stated at some point that no one understands what McCoyan says, but everyone believes that McCoyan is a reasonable man. |
| 2:40.0 | So that reasonable man indeed is there at the table. And he was against the idea of putting missiles on Cuba from the very beginning. |
| 2:52.0 | He was trying to convince Kurshev not to do that, but he failed. The missiles were put there. |
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