THE ORIGINAL CUBAN-RUSSIAN THREAT, 1962: 4/8: Tactical nukes deployed: 4/8: 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
⏱️ 8 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.
1960
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is CBSi on the world. I'm John Bouchou with Seri Ploki. Professor Seri Ploki's new book is Nuclear |
| 0:07.9 | Folly, a history of the Cuban missile crisis. He has transcripts from the tapes made by President Kennedy in his consultation with his |
| 0:16.8 | counselors before and after the Excom Committee of the NSC begins on the 23rd. We have notes from the Presidium meeting. |
| 0:25.8 | Kosegan's there. Bresnaf's there. |
| 0:28.3 | Mikoyan is there. And we will come to Mikoyan because he, like like Adley Stevenson is a man who represents diplomacy and not war fighting. |
| 0:37.0 | During the week of following the revelations on the 19th brainstorming,'m following the professor's reporting on the 20th |
| 0:46.4 | Russ brings in Gramiko and they have a confrontational meeting with President |
| 0:51.9 | Kennedy. |
| 0:52.6 | Quamico has excuses claiming the R-12s and R-14s are defensive missiles. |
| 0:58.3 | On the 20th again, later that night, the committee comes together and they vote for a blockade. However, during |
| 1:05.4 | the course of that day the Joint Chiefs have spoken out. They're ready for |
| 1:10.1 | invasion. Upland 312. |
| 1:12.9 | Professor, who says Munich to the President of the United States? |
| 1:16.3 | And why does he say it? |
| 1:19.2 | Well, Gerald Lemie, of course, is leading opposition to President Kennedy. |
| 1:27.0 | And he is really quite, quite brutal and disrespectful in doing that. |
| 1:35.8 | He is challenging him in front of other chips and accusing him of a pizement and a |
| 1:43.7 | peacement was something that was really very very offensive for Jack Kennedy |
| 1:51.9 | because his father of of course Joseph Kennedy, who was US Ambassador in UK, was accused of a pizment of Hitler before Munich agreement in 1938, so Kennedy has to fight back. |
| 2:07.0 | But it's more than just Curtis LeMay, who is in opposition to the president, the chiefs the majority of them, |
| 2:16.2 | consider him to be unexperienced, not ready to be the president, and they point finger at him for the disaster of the Bay of |
| 2:27.3 | Peets disaster one year earlier in April of 1961 when the President Kennedy gave okay or go ahead for the |
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