6/8: When the Kremlin backs down from the brink: 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
🗓️ 26 June 2023
⏱️ 6 minutes
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6/8: When the Kremlin backs down from the brink: 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.
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 CBSI in the world. I'm John Bachelors, Sarah He Plokey. His new book is Nuclear |
| 0:10.3 | Folly, History of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Not once, not twice, not twice. Several times |
| 0:15.6 | we come to the brink of nuclear exchange. Again, the weekend of Friday the 26th, 27th, |
| 0:23.0 | the 28th, that weekend is when the world ended. You didn't know that, did you? Well, it |
| 0:28.2 | did as far as the imaginations of men at the Presidium and the Cremlin, men at the |
| 0:33.1 | X-Common Washington, even to the point of calling their families or arranging their families |
| 0:39.7 | to get out of Washington. They had no way of stopping this. And what happens now is that |
| 0:46.5 | Khrushchev writes letters, two letters. One is communicated in private. The other, as the |
| 0:52.8 | professor says, is broadcast on Radio Moscow and picked up in Washington. They say different |
| 1:00.1 | things. And they introduce the Turkey situation, the Turkey missiles. What does Khrushchev |
| 1:06.4 | imagine he's talking, he's offering? Khrushchev is an panic. He starts backing off immediately |
| 1:18.8 | after Khrushchev, after Canada's speech. And again, he turns back the ships. But he wouldn't |
| 1:25.6 | be Khrushchev if he wouldn't try to portray his retreat as an offensive. And he also is quite |
| 1:33.9 | mercurial in terms of how he approaches things. He can think one thing today and then change |
| 1:40.4 | his mind tomorrow. And this is exactly what happened. So his first letter was saying that, |
| 1:46.8 | well, if the United States agrees not to attack Cuba, we would be prepared to discuss |
| 1:57.4 | the withdrawal of our troops from Cuba. He doesn't mention directly the missiles, but that's actually |
| 2:06.3 | what everyone knows and has in mind. And at the moment when the Kennedy and X-Farm get together to |
| 2:14.8 | discuss that proposal, they hear news on the radio that there isn't a matter by Khrushchev and |
| 2:24.1 | they think, okay, that's the letter that they're discussing. But then there are elements of that |
| 2:28.1 | letter that is different from the one that they're discussing now. And that new element is that |
| 2:35.0 | Khrushchev waking up the next morning, learning that the Americans didn't attack Cuba, |
... |
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