THE ORIGINAL CUBAN-RUSSIAN THREAT, 1962: 2/8: Tactical nukes deployed: 2/8: Nuclear Folly: A History of the Cuban Missile Crisis, by Serhii Plokhy
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 23 June 2024
⏱️ 6 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.
1959
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is CBSi on the world. I'm John Bachelor and |
| 0:06.2 | Seri Plochi's new book is Nuclear Folly a history of the Cuban missile |
| 0:10.4 | crisis. We come to a moment, a pause in the crisis at hand in the White House, to ask |
| 0:18.0 | Nikita Khrushchev, who was he at this moment? Professor, my growing up and our growing up, Khrushchev was |
| 0:26.7 | emphasized as something of a large clownish character banging his shoe at the |
| 0:32.0 | United Nations, but he was bloody-minded, he was |
| 0:35.0 | successful, he was a peasant, and he was a powerful actor, often telling crude |
| 0:39.9 | proverbs and overwhelming the better educated in the more ideological |
| 0:45.0 | Presidium. However, what was he to Jack Kennedy? What was their history |
| 0:49.6 | together that comes to this crisis in 62. |
| 0:54.0 | First to one about Nikita Khrushchev. |
| 0:58.0 | He was really mistook to be a clown by many people who dealt with him. |
| 1:05.0 | But the most important thing about Nikita Khrushchev |
| 1:08.6 | is that he became successor to Joseph Stalin. He's not only survived under Joseph Stalin for decades, but he also was able to outsmart and then eventually to kill the chief secret policeman of Joseph Stalin, his name was |
| 1:29.2 | Waver ebbere. So it was a very shrewd and experienced and cany politician and political leader and he believed |
| 1:39.9 | that Jack Kennedy actually owed him his presidential election, |
| 1:46.1 | because he was sending the KGB officers |
| 1:48.7 | to the headquarters of President Kennedy, Kennedy, |
| 1:53.0 | headed by that time by Robert Kennedy, |
| 1:56.0 | offering help and assistance. |
| 1:58.0 | So in today's language, we probably would call this collusion. |
| 2:01.0 | But if crucial was misunderstood by many people he certainly |
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