RESTART NUCLEAR WEAPON ESCALATION IN THE RUSSO-UKRAINIAN WAR: 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
🗓️ 24 November 2024
⏱️ 13 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.
1906 WAR OF THE WORLDS
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | 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 and the United States. |
| 0:20.4 | And it's a great pleasure to welcome Serhi Plokhi, a professor at Harvard University |
| 0:26.3 | and the author of the new book, Nuclear Folly, a history of the Cuban Missile Crisis. |
| 0:32.5 | We begin with the drama of dramas. |
| 0:35.7 | It is October 16, 1962, approximately 8 a.m. at the White House. |
| 0:41.1 | McGeorge Bundy, former Harvard Dean, now the National Security Advisor, enters President John |
| 0:47.4 | F. Kennedy's bedroom. Mr. Kennedy, I learned from Professor Plokie, enjoys reading the Sunday papers before he gets out of bed. |
| 0:57.7 | Mr. Bundy has very bad information for the president that upsets him. |
| 1:02.8 | Professor, a very good evening to you. |
| 1:04.9 | Thank you for this. |
| 1:05.8 | What does McGeorge Bundy tell President Kennedy that morning? |
| 1:09.9 | Good evening to you. |
| 1:16.6 | Good evening, John. And thanks for having me on your show. It's a real pleasure. Well, Bundy is bringing the news that are not in the newspapers. And again, we are in a very different place compared to our today's world. |
| 1:28.3 | It's 1962. |
| 1:30.3 | The news are not spread with the help of Twitter and of Facebook. |
| 1:36.3 | So the news are at least 24 hour old. |
| 1:41.3 | And what Bundy brings, he brings the news that are not in the newspapers, and that is that the Soviet |
| 1:49.0 | potentially nuclear-armed ballistic missiles was spotted a day and a half before that on the territory of Cuba by by American reconnaissance playing U2, |
| 2:04.3 | the immediate reaction from the President |
| 2:07.5 | of the United States at that point is, |
| 2:09.9 | he can't do that to me. |
| 2:11.9 | He later would actually use also |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from John Batchelor, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of John Batchelor and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.