MOSCOW HAS RETURNED TO THE AMERICAS: CUBA, VENEZUELA, NICARAGUA: 1/8: Nuclear Folly: A History of the Cuban Missile Crisis, by Serhii Plokhy
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 10 December 2023
⏱️ 16 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
https://www.amazon.com/Nuclear-Folly-History-Missile-Crisis/dp/0393540812/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=
Nearly thirty years after the end of the Cold War, today’s world leaders are abandoning disarmament treaties, building up their nuclear arsenals, and exchanging threats of nuclear strikes. To survive this new atomic age, we must relearn the lessons of the most dangerous moment of the Cold War: the Cuban missile crisis.
Serhii Plokhy’s Nuclear Folly offers an international perspective on the crisis, tracing the tortuous decision-making that produced and then resolved it, which involved John Kennedy and his advisers, Nikita Khrushchev and Fidel Castro, and their commanders on the ground. In breathtaking detail, Plokhy vividly recounts the young JFK being played by the canny Khrushchev; the hotheaded Castro willing to defy the USSR and threatening to align himself with China; the Soviet troops on the ground clearing jungle foliage in the tropical heat, and desperately trying to conceal nuclear installations on Cuba, which were nonetheless easily spotted by U-2 spy planes; and the hair-raising near misses at sea that nearly caused a Soviet nuclear-armed submarine to fire its weapons
1920 HAVANA
Transcript
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| 0:57.0 | The Cuban Missile Crisis 1962 it is a vast window on the Cold War and on the misunderstandings, misstatements, mistakes that were made by the leaders of several nations, most notably the Soviet Union |
| 1:16.0 | and the United States. |
| 1:17.8 | And it's a great pleasure to welcome Seri Plochi, a professor at Harvard University and the author of the new book Nuclear Folly, a history of the Cuban |
| 1:28.7 | Missile Crisis. |
| 1:30.0 | We begin with the drama of dramas. |
| 1:33.0 | It is October 16, 1962, approximately 8 a.m. at the White House. |
| 1:38.3 | McGeorge Bundy, former Harvard Dean, now the National Security Advisor, enters President John F. Kennedy's bedroom. |
| 1:46.3 | Mr. Kennedy, I learned from Professor Ploke, enjoys reading the Sunday papers before he gets out of bed. |
| 1:55.0 | Mr Bundy has very bad information for the president that upsets him. |
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