THE ORIGINAL CUBAN-RUSSIAN THREAT, 1962: 6/8: Tactical nukes deployed: 6/8: 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
🧾️ Download transcript
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 CASTRO AND NASSER
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | This is a series |
| 0:05.0 | CBS I in the world. I'm John Bachelor with Serhe Ploki. |
| 0:09.0 | His new book is Nuclear Folly, a history of the Cuban Missile Crisis. |
| 0:12.0 | Not once, not twice, |
| 0:13.8 | not thrice. Several times we come to the brink of nuclear exchange. |
| 0:18.1 | Again, the weekend of Friday, the 26th, the 27th, 28th, that weekend is when the world ended. |
| 0:26.8 | You didn't know that, did you? |
| 0:28.1 | Well, it did as far as the imaginations of men at the Presidium in the Kremlin, men at the Xcom in Washington, even to the point of calling |
| 0:37.1 | their families or arranging their families to get out of Washington. |
| 0:41.6 | They had no way of stopping this and what happens now is that |
| 0:46.5 | Khrushchev writes letters, two letters. One is communicated in private, |
| 0:51.8 | the other as the professor says is broadcast on |
| 0:55.0 | radio Moscow and picked up in Washington. They say different things and they |
| 1:00.8 | introduce the Turkey situation, the Turkey missiles. |
| 1:05.0 | What does Khrushchev imagine he's offering? |
| 1:10.0 | Khrushchev is in a panic. |
| 1:15.0 | He starts backing off immediately after Khrushchev, after Kennedy's speech, |
| 1:22.0 | and again he turns back the ships. Cruz |
| 1:25.0 | after Kennedy's speech and again he turns back the ships. But he wouldn't be Khrushchev if he wouldn't try to portray his retreat as an offensive. |
| 1:32.0 | And he also is quite mercurial in terms of how he approaches things. He can think one thing today and then change his mind tomorrow. And this is exactly what happened. So his first letter was saying that well if the United States agrees not to attack |
| 1:52.3 | Cuba we agrees not to attack Cuba, we would be prepared to discuss the withdrawal of our troops from Cuba. |
| 2:00.6 | He doesn't mention directly the missiles, but that's actually what everyone knows and |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from John Batchelor, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of John Batchelor and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.