7/8: When the Kremlin backs down from the brink: 7/8: 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
⏱️ 11 minutes
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7/8: When the Kremlin backs down from the brink: 7/8: 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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| 0:34.7 | This is CBS I On The World. I'm John Bachelors with Serhi Plokki, |
| 0:38.3 | Professor Serhi Plokki of Harvard University. His new book is |
| 0:42.1 | Nuclear Folly, a history of the Cuban Missile Crisis. |
| 0:45.6 | It is Saturday, October 27th. Black Saturday, it's famously infamously called. |
| 0:51.6 | There are two events that bring both sides to the level of we're going to shoot. |
| 0:59.9 | They're going to shoot. We're going to shoot. |
| 1:02.4 | I tell the first one because it happens in the Sargaso Sea. |
| 1:06.6 | It's almost like a melodrama that has no ending. |
| 1:11.5 | US Fletilla has been following one, if not all of the Russian submarine Fletilla. Fox trots. |
| 1:19.2 | These are diesel-powered submarines, not nuclear. This is early days for nuclear submarines, |
| 1:24.8 | for the Soviet fleet. One of those B-59 must surface to restore its battery power. |
| 1:32.2 | At some point, and when they do surface, they realize they've been tracked very carefully |
| 1:37.7 | by the US Navy. The USS Coney is following them. |
| 1:41.7 | And at the same time, directions have been given from XCOM to Harris, |
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