HEADLINE: Black Saturday Escapes Catastrophe: The Submarine and the Downed U-2 GUEST NAME: Professor Serhii Plokhy BOOK TITLE: Nuclear Folly TOPIC: Accidental War Warning SUMMARY: Black Saturday (October 27, 1962) saw two accidents nearly trigger nuclear

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John Batchelor

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🗓️ 22 September 2025

⏱️ 12 minutes

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HEADLINE: Black Saturday Escapes Catastrophe: The Submarine and the Downed U-2 GUEST NAME: Professor Serhii Plokhy BOOK TITLE: Nuclear Folly TOPIC: Accidental War Warning SUMMARY: Black Saturday(October 27, 1962) saw two accidents nearly trigger nuclear war. In the Sargasso Sea, the Soviet submarine B-59, tracked by the USS Cony, prepared to fire a nuclear torpedo until Captain Vasily Arkhipov overruled the order. Separately in Cuba, Soviet forces, believing invasion was imminent following orders from Fidel Castro, shot down an American U-2plane, killing Major Anderson.
1959

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0:30.4	This is CBSI on the world. I'm John Bachelor with Serhi Ploki. Professor Serhi Ploki of Harvard University. His new book is Nuclear Folly, a history of the Cuban Missile Crisis. It is Saturday,
0:37.3	October 27th.
0:39.0	Black Saturday, it's famously, infamously called.
0:43.0	There are two events that bring both sides to the level of we're going to shoot.
0:50.4	They're going to shoot.
0:51.4	We're going to shoot.
0:52.9	I tell the first one because it happens in the
0:55.9	Sargasso Sea. It's almost like a melodrama that has no ending. U.S. Fletilla has been following
1:04.2	one, if not all, of the Russian submarine flotilla, fox trots. These are diesel-powered submarines, not nuclear.
1:12.5	This is early days for nuclear submarines for the Soviet fleet. One of those B-59 must surface to
1:20.3	restore its battery power at some point. And when they do surface, they realize they've been
1:26.6	tracked very carefully by the U.S. Navy,
1:29.3	the U.S.S. Kony, is following them. And at the same time, directions have been given from
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