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This is CBSI in the world. I'm John Dotsu, 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 spring of 1962. What is Khrushchev's mind at this point, Professor?

Well, 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 Bulgarian

port city of Varna, toward the Turkish territory, where a few years earlier, the U.S. installed

the ballistic missiles, nuclear-armed ballistic missiles called Jupiters.

And the idea came to him to put an equivalent of Jupiter's to Cuba next to the borders of the United

States and as he said, allowed the Americans to taste their own medicine.

Why he was doing that? Because despite his bluff, 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.

...