Nuclear Folly A History of the Cuban Missile Crisis

Serhii Plokhy, Keith Sellon-Wright

eAudio - 2021

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 a...nd threatening to align himself with China; the Soviet troops on the ground, desperately trying to conceal nuclear installations on Cuba; and the hair-raising near misses at sea that nearly caused a Soviet nuclear-armed submarine to fire its weapons. More... more