
Nuclear Folly
A History of the Cuban Missile Crisis
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Narrated by:
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Keith Sellon-Wright
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By:
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Serhii Plokhy
Nearly 30 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, 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 often than not, the Americans and Soviets misread each other, operated under false information, and came perilously close to nuclear catastrophe. Despite these errors, nuclear war was ultimately avoided for one central reason: fear, and the realization that any escalation on either the Soviets' or the Americans' part would lead to mutual destruction.
©2021 Serhii Plokhy (P)2021 KaloramaListeners also enjoyed...




















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Terrific book
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Very interesting
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Putting the reader in the story
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Incredible Narrative
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The author references a multitude of primary sources and tells a story of the crisis that I believe is true but never imagined. I have read articles about the crisis and even transcripts of Kennedy's secret White House recordings but after reading this book I realize that they are all incomplete and give one side only.
I firmly believe that this can happen again if we elect the wrong people into office. After reading the book I think you will feel the same way.
A Must Read
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