This is CBSI in the world. I'm John Bachelors, Sarah He Polky. His new book is Nuclear

Folly, History of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Not once, not twice, not twice. Several times

we come to the brink of nuclear exchange. Again, the weekend of Friday the 26th, the 27th,

the 28th, that weekend is when the world ended. You didn't know that, did you? Well, it

did as far as the imaginations of men at the Presidium and the Cremlin, men at the

X-Common Washington, even to the point of calling their families or arranging their families

to get out of Washington. They had no way of stopping this. And what happens now is that

Khrushchev writes letters, two letters. One is communicated in private. The other way,

as the professor says, is broadcast on Radio Moscow and picked up in Washington. They say

different things. And they introduce the Turkey situation, the Turkey missiles. What does

Khrushchev imagine he's talking, he's offering?

Well, Khrushchev is an panic. He starts backing off immediately after Khrushchev, after

the Canada speech, 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. 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. And this is exactly what happened. So his first letter was saying that, well,

if the United States agrees not to attack Cuba, we would be prepared to discuss the withdrawal

of our troops from Cuba. He doesn't mention directly the missiles, but that's actually

what everyone knows and has in mind. And at the moment when the Kennedy and X-Farm get together

to discuss that proposal, they hear news on the radio that there isn't a matter by Khrushchev

and they think, okay, that's the letter that they're discussing. But then there are elements

of that letter that is different from the one that they're discussing now. And that new

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