RESTART NUCLEAR WEAPON ESCALATION IN THE RUSSO-UKRAINIAN WAR: 8/8: 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.
1953 ON THE BEACH
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is CBSI on the World. |
| 0:06.7 | I'm John Baxter with Professor Serhi Ploki. |
| 0:09.6 | His exciting, thrilling, challenging, amazing new book is nuclear folly, a history of the Cuban missile crisis. |
| 0:17.1 | The world started again on October 27th. |
| 0:20.2 | By October 28th, the perception in Washington is that |
| 0:23.6 | Jack Kennedy has won. The perception in Moscow is Nikita Khrushchev to rationalize. Well, |
| 0:30.8 | I've made them promise they won't invade the island, so we've saved Cuba. Well, I've got the missiles |
| 0:35.5 | out of Turkey. But Malinvsky, the chairman of the |
| 0:39.1 | Joint Chiefs of Staff, their equivalent, General and Chief, and other voices at the Presidium, |
| 0:44.5 | that would be Mr. Kosigen and Mr. Brezhnev, do not believe that it's a success. But that will |
| 0:50.2 | wait two more years before Khrushchev is removed in a coup in the Presidium. |
| 0:55.5 | Right now, we have to deal with Khrushchev rationalizing what's happening. |
| 1:00.4 | He can. He does. He calls it a success to guarantee Cuba. |
| 1:05.4 | But at no point, as the professor indicated, has he consulted with Fidel Castro, the passionate young man who is now |
| 1:13.3 | in charge of an island where there are still nuclear-tip missiles, tactical missiles, |
| 1:20.7 | IL-28 bombers capable of carrying nuclear warheads, nuclear warheads parked in one particular ship tied up in Cuba. Castro's in |
| 1:30.4 | charge of all of this. Professor, Khrushchev did not pay attention to Castro. He then realizes that |
| 1:38.4 | Castro is going to be a problem. He turns to Mikoyen and asks him to solve this. |
| 1:45.9 | McCoyen again is the hero. |
| 1:49.9 | Does McCoyen at this point, does he feel vindicated? |
| 1:51.6 | Does he feel put upon? |
| 1:53.1 | He's got family problems. |
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