RESTART NUCLEAR WEAPON ESCALATION IN THE RUSSO-UKRAINIAN WAR: 7/8: 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
⏱️ 10 minutes
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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
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| 0:00.0 | This is CBSI on the world. |
| 0:06.7 | I'm John Bachelor with Sergei Ploki, Professor Serhi Ploki of Harvard University. |
| 0:11.4 | His new book is Nuclear Folly, a history of the Cuban Missile Crisis. |
| 0:16.0 | It is Saturday, October 27th. |
| 0:18.9 | Black Saturday, it's famously, infamously called. |
| 0:22.9 | There are two events that bring both sides to the level of we're going to shoot. |
| 0:30.3 | They're going to shoot, we're going to shoot. |
| 0:32.8 | I tell the first one because it happens in the Sargasso Sea. |
| 0:36.9 | It's almost like a melodrama that has no |
| 0:40.0 | ending. A U.S. flotilla has been following one, if not all, of the Russian submarine flotilla, |
| 0:48.4 | fox trots. These are diesel-powered submarines, not nuclear. This is early days for nuclear submarines for the Soviet fleet. |
| 0:56.9 | One of those B-59 must surface to restore its battery power at some point. And when they do surface, |
| 1:05.6 | they realize they've been tracked very carefully by the U.S. Navy. The U.S.S. Kony is following them. And at the same time, |
| 1:14.2 | directions have been given from XCOM to harass the Soviet submarines if you find them, |
| 1:21.1 | harass them, use overflights, buzz them, drop flares, and even given orders to the fleet that they can drop dummy depth charges. |
| 1:33.2 | All of this can be misunderstood, is misunderstood by B-59. |
| 1:38.6 | What we do not at this point understand in the U.S. Navy is that that B-59 has a nuclear-tip submarine torpedo |
| 1:47.3 | in its forward tubes. Professor, the events of B-59 are too fantastic to believe. This is one of |
| 1:55.2 | those things where you can't make this stuff up. It had to be history. Who is the commander of the |
| 2:00.4 | flotilla? Who is the commander of |
| 2:02.4 | B-59? And what do they make of the USS Coney's threats? Well, we are talking about October |
| 2:11.2 | 27, 1962, and I would call it probably the second birthday of the world because really the nuclear war could |
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