This is CBSI in the World. I'm John Bachelorette, Professor Serhi Polki. His new book is nuclear

folly, a history of the Cuban Missile Crisis. It is 1962. The White House is informed.

There's a red line and it's been crossed. The White House is seeking an answer. But why?

Why did Khrushchev do this? As Kennedy says in his first blush of analysis, he doesn't

gain anything from this. He can wipe us out with his ICBMs. He doesn't need to put medium-range

or short-range missiles into Cuba. He certainly doesn't need them to put them in the hands of

Castro's regime. So why? Turns out that Khrushchev himself had this idea during a trip to Bulgaria

in the in the spring of 1962. What is Khrushchev's mind at this point, Professor?

Bulgaria was not an accident because in Bulgaria he was talking to rallies that were organized

for him by the communist leaders of Bulgaria pointing across the Black Sea from Bulgaria and

poor city of Varna, to the Turkish territory, where a few years earlier, you asked, installed

the ballistic missiles, our ballistic missiles, called Jupiters. The idea came to him to

put an equivalent of Jupiters to Cuba next to the borders of the United States. As he said,

allowed the Americans to taste their own medicine. Why he was doing that? Because despite his

blood, the Soviet Union at that time in 1962 had no more than five or six intercontinental missiles,

ballistic missiles that could reach the territory of the United States. While the United States at that

time was building and one of that was deploying the Minutron missiles that could hit the territory of

the Soviet Union from Montana, from the American Midwest. Khrushchev had nothing to no missiles to

respond to the challenge that was posed by Minutron. So this balance in terms of the missiles and

the number of missiles and the kind of missiles that they had, the so-called missile gap was there,

but unlike Kennedy claimed during this presidential campaign that the missile gap was in favor of the

Soviet Union in reality. The missile gap was in favor of the United States. Khrushchev knew that

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