Hello everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit.

In October 1962, the world came very close to annihilation, the Cuban Missile Crisis.

It lasted just over a month, the confrontation between the USA and the JFK, its youthful

president and the Soviet Union under that Stalin-grad veteran Nikita Khrushchev.

It's often considered to be the closest that the Cold War came to escalating to full-scale

nuclear war. The happy news for you folks is that Sergei Poloki is coming back on the

podcast. He's written a new book to tell us that it actually came closer than we previously

thought. Our lives are hanging on a thread. It's a goddamn miracle that I'm talking to

you at all, actually, in more ways than one. In the autumn of 1962, a U2 reconnaissance aircraft

produced very clear evidence that the Soviet Union and the Cuban authorities were building

medium-range ballistic missile facilities on the island of Cuba, which was only about

100 miles from the Florida coast. This is when it all kicked off.

So hey, Poloki has been on this podcast before. He's a Ukrainian American, he teaches at

Harvard, he's a fantastically distinguished. His new book is very, very brilliant indeed.

It's called New Cliff Folly and he's got a really good kicker. The really good kicker

is that we should all be a lot more scared than we are about the nuclear situation at the

moment. So let's say what, this is unusual here. Just don't listen to this podcast. If

you just don't want to be made to feel slightly nervous about the geopolitical situation

that we all face, just don't listen to it. Go and listen to something else.

But if you're ready for that, enjoy this conversation. And if you wish to cheer yourself up,

after listening to it, just go back and luxury it in our wonderful history. Go to history.tv.

It's our new digital history channel. I met a listener the other day to this podcast.

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