THE ORIGINAL CUBAN-RUSSIAN THREAT, 1962: 5/8: Tactical nukes deployed: 5/8: 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
⏱️ 12 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 HEMINGWAY CONTEST
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is a |
| 0:05.0 | This is CBS Eye on the World. |
| 0:08.0 | Here's John Batchelor. |
| 0:10.0 | The Cuban Missile Crisis. |
| 0:12.0 | The crisis is at hand. It is October 22nd, 23rd in Moscow. |
| 0:19.0 | The Presidium meeting in the Kremlin. |
| 0:21.0 | Nikita Khrushchev is the first secretary. The others at the table are critical. |
| 0:27.0 | I turn to Seri Ploki, his new book Nuclear Folly, a history of the Cuban Missile Crisis, using transcripts from the tape recordings |
| 0:36.4 | that President Kennedy made of his meetings in the White House, using notes that were |
| 0:41.6 | made at the Presinium meeting in Moscow. |
| 0:44.0 | These two leaders of nuclear-tipped-powered countries |
| 0:48.0 | are unaware what each other is saying |
| 0:51.0 | and their information is out of date |
| 0:52.0 | and it's often misunderstood by |
| 0:54.4 | both sides. So we go now to the Presidium meeting late on the 22nd in Moscow. |
| 0:59.9 | It's eight hours ahead of Washington. They take a break in the middle of the evening. |
| 1:05.0 | At this point, Professor Khrushchev doesn't know what's going to happen, but there's a man at the table |
| 1:11.0 | who has an alternative all the way through these discussions |
| 1:15.1 | about deploying missiles. His name is McCoyan. He has a great deal of authority on |
| 1:20.7 | his own because he's one of the original |
| 1:22.6 | revolutionaries. Who is he? What do we need to know about him at this point? |
| 1:26.2 | Anastas Mikoyan is a very, very interesting figure. The one who survived at the very top of the Soviet |
... |
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