To The Precipice | Part 8

The Cold War: Prelude To The Present

The Daily Wire

Society & Culture, History

4.7 • 7.8K Ratings

🗓️ 20 March 2020

⏱️ 50 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Following the Bay of Pigs disaster, and a second crisis in Europe resulting in the deadly grey reality of the Berlin Wall, an over-confident Nikita Khrushchev decides to further test what the Soviets see as a weak and vacillating Kennedy administration. As US reconnaissance overflights of Cuba resume after a hiatus following the events at Playa Giron, analysts are shocked to discover rings of Russian-made surface-to-air missile installations. While these themselves pose no threat to the United States, the installations follow the classic designs used by the Soviets to protect important ground installations. Then they see them: Russian medium-range, nuclear-tipped missiles capable of striking the entire East Coast. More are on the way from Russia, lashed to the decks of Soviet transports. Announcing an outright blockade of Cuba would be recognized as an act of war, so President Kennedy employs the Soviet tactic of linguistic sophistry and announces a "quarantine zone." As US Navy warships move to intercept the incoming missiles, the fate of the world hangs in the balance -- and is ultimately in the hands of a single man, not in either the White House or the Kremlin, but deep beneath the waves at the edge of the quarantine zone. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Fidel Castro's communist Cuba had become a thorn that would remain in the side of the
0:08.6	United States through 11 presidencies and counting.
0:12.8	Likewise Berlin, that is West Berlin, would become more than a thorn in the side of the
0:17.9	Soviet Union.
0:19.4	The existence of a free and prosperous western outpost, 100 miles deep inside the communist
0:24.9	empire, had wrangled the Soviets enough to have started the Cold War with the Berlin
0:28.9	blockade in 1948, and four decades later, the fall of the wall that had not yet been built
0:35.9	would be the augury of its imminent inevitable demise.
0:39.7	18 months after the disaster at the Bay of Pigs, this gray and dismal former capital of
0:45.4	Nazi Germany would be shackled together with that tropical island, each thorn pushing
0:51.2	in extrably upon the other.
1:21.2	Nikita Khrushchev was hardly a well-educated man, at least not in the traditional sense.
1:34.4	This son of Russian peasants spent his boyhood hurting sheep.
1:38.0	He apprenticed as a skilled metal fitter in Dinesd, hard of Zarniklis II's burgeoning industrial
1:43.6	base.
1:44.6	It would be called upon to enter the surreal hell of a Russian coal mine descending into
1:49.5	the city darkness to repair broken down machinery.
1:53.2	Late in life, he recalled that he had seriously considered emigrating to the United States
1:58.2	in search of better conditions and higher wages.
2:01.6	He had completed a total of four years of elementary education.
2:06.5	On April 17, 1912, workers at the Lena Gold Mining Partnership in Northeast Siberia went
2:12.9	on strike to protest subhuman working conditions.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from The Daily Wire, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of The Daily Wire and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.