6/8: Nuclear Folly: A History of the Cuban Missile Crisis, by Serhii Plokhy
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 29 December 2022
⏱️ 7 minutes
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6/8: 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.
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| 0:00.0 | Fasten your seatbelts. Easy jets, big orange sail is now on. With up to 20% of 700,000 seats |
| 0:10.0 | and 300 pounds of package holidays. But hurry, they're flying fast. Book now! |
| 0:19.0 | Selected travel dates, cell ends 11pm on 10th January 2023. |
| 0:24.0 | Demons been required and not to be protected. Travel restrictions and season sees up live. |
| 0:35.0 | This is CBSI in the world. I'm John Bachelors, Serhi Polki. His new book is nuclear |
| 0:40.0 | folly, a history of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Not once, not twice, not twice. Several times |
| 0:45.0 | we come to the brink of nuclear exchange. Again, the weekend of Friday the 26th, 27th to 28th, |
| 0:53.0 | that weekend is when the world ended. You didn't know that, did you? Well, it did as far |
| 0:58.0 | as the imaginations of men at the Presidium and the Cremlin, men at the X-Common, Washington. |
| 1:04.0 | Even to the point of calling their families or arranging their families to get out of Washington. |
| 1:10.0 | They had no way of stopping this. And what happens now is that Khrushchev writes letters, two letters. |
| 1:18.0 | One is communicated in private. The other, as the professor says, is broadcast on radio |
| 1:25.0 | Moscow and picked up in Washington. They say different things and they introduce the Turkey situation, |
| 1:32.0 | the Turkey missiles. What does Khrushchev imagine he's talking, he's offering? |
| 1:39.0 | Khrushchev is an panic. He starts backing off immediately after Khrushchev, after Canada's speech. |
| 1:50.0 | And again, he turns back the ships. But he wouldn't be Khrushchev if he wouldn't try to portray his retreat as an offensive. |
| 1:59.0 | And he also is quite mercurial in terms of how he approaches things. He can think one thing today and then change his mind tomorrow. |
| 2:09.0 | And this is exactly what happened. So his first letter was saying that, well, if the United States agrees not to attack Cuba, |
| 2:21.0 | we would be prepared to discuss the withdrawal of our troops from Cuba. He doesn't mention directly the missiles, |
| 2:32.0 | but that's actually what everyone knows and has in mind. And at the moment when the Kennedy and X-FOM get together to discuss that proposal, |
| 2:43.0 | they hear news on the radio that there isn't a letter by Khrushchev and they think, okay, that's the letter that they're discussing. |
| 2:53.0 | But then there are elements of that letter that is different from the one that they're discussing now. |
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