HEADLINE: The Two Letters: The Demand for Jupiter Missiles in Turkey GUEST NAME: Professor Serhii Plokhy BOOK TITLE: Nuclear Folly TOPIC: Accidental War Warning SUMMARY: Khrushchev sent two conflicting letters during the height of the crisis: a private o

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John Batchelor

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🗓️ 22 September 2025

⏱️ 7 minutes

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Summary

HEADLINE: The Two Letters: The Demand for Jupiter Missiles in Turkey GUEST NAME: Professor Serhii PlokhyBOOK TITLE: Nuclear Folly TOPIC: Accidental War Warning SUMMARY: Khrushchev sent two conflicting letters during the height of the crisis: a private one discussing withdrawal for a guarantee not to attack Cuba, and a second, broadcast via Radio Moscow, demanding the withdrawal of US Jupiter missiles from Turkey. Kennedy personally favored trading the Turkey missiles, which were a NATO liability, but ExComm feared the political consequences of undermining the alliance.
1920 CUBA

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0:18.0	Visit sumup.co. UK to learn more.
0:26.7	This is CBSI and the world.
0:28.7	I'm John Bachelor with Serhi Ploki.
0:30.9	His new book is Nuclear Folly,
0:32.6	a history of the Cuban Missile Crisis.
0:34.4	Not once, not twice, not thrice.
0:40.2	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,
0:47.8	did you? Well, it did as far as the imaginations of men at the Presidium in the Kremlin,
0:52.8	men at the excom in Washington, even to the point of
0:56.9	calling their families or arranging their families to get out of Washington.
1:01.5	They had no way of stopping this.
1:04.2	And what happens now is that Khrushchev writes letters, two letters.
1:09.5	One is communicated in private.
1:12.1	The other, as the professor says, is broadcast on Radio Moscow and picked up in Washington.
	...

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