This is CBS I On The World. I'm John Bachelors, Serhi Plokki, Professor Serhi Plokki

of Harvard University. His new book is Nuclear Folly, a history of Cuban missile crisis.

It is Saturday, October 27th. Black Saturday, it's famously infamously called. There are

two events that bring both sides to the level of we're going to shoot. They're going to

shoot. We're going to shoot. I tell the first one because it happens in the Sargaso

Sea. It's almost like a melodrama that has no ending.

A U.S. Fletilla has been following one, if not all of the Russian submarine Fletilla,

Fox trots. These are diesel-powered submarines, not nuclear. This is early days for nuclear

submarines for the Soviet fleet. One of those B-59 must surface to restore its battery

power. At some point, and when they do surface, they realize they've been tracked very carefully

by the U.S. Navy. The USS Coney is following them. And at the same time, directions have

been given from XCOM to Harris, the Soviet submarines. If you find them, Harris them,

use overflights, buzz them, drop flares, and even given orders to the fleet that they can

drop dummy depth charges. All of this can be misunderstood, is misunderstood by B-59.

What we do not, at this point, understand in the U.S. Navy, is that that B-59 has a nuclear

tip submarine torpedo in its forward tubes. Professor, the events of B-59 are too fantastic

to believe. This is one of those things where you can't make this stuff up. It had to be

history. Who is the commander of the Fletilla? Who is the commander of B-59? And what

do they make of the USS Coney's threat?

We are talking about October 27, 1962. And I would call it probably the second birthday

of the world, because really the nuclear war could start on a number of occasions during

that Saturday day. And the fact that it didn't start, it's really, really, we all got lucky,

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