My Amazon Review of Serhii Plokhy's "Nuclear Folly: A History of the Cuban Missile Crisis"

 

Khrushchev’s Nuclear Gamble

 

Many books have been written about the October 1962 Cuban missile crisis, but I believe that Harvard historian and Russia expert Serhii Plokhy’s will become the standard text. He views the crisis from the Russian side and introduces declassified Soviet and Ukrainian KGB files along with interviews of several of the participants. From early on Khrushchev sees Kennedy as far easier to deal with than Nixon. In fact, Plokhy highlights conversations between a KGB officer and Robert Kennedy prior to the 1960 election. Today we would call that collusion. Khrushchev does his best to get Kennedy elected by highlighting Soviet missile strength which played into Kennedy’s campaign highlighting the missile gap, which was nonexistent.

 

With Cold War tensions seething over Berlin, Kennedy meets Khrushhev in Vienna in June 1961. Khrushchev browbeats Kennedy and comes to believe that he can get away with anything. The seeds of the missile crisis were planted in Vienna. The official Soviet rationale for the missiles were to offset the presence of U.S. Jupiter missiles in Turkey. But there was more to it. The Soviets wanted to prevent another invasion of Cuba, checkmate the U.S. in Berlin by opening up another front, and feared that the development of the solid fueled Minuteman missile would give the U.S. a first strike capability when, in fact, Russia had few ICBMs.

 

Khrushchev bullies his presidium to activate his plans to place missiles with their nuclear warheads in Cuba. He argued that their presence could be kept secret, but his military and the Old Bolshevik Anastas Mikoyan correctly argued otherwise. Mikoyan is the hero of the piece on the Soviet side because he later convinces Castro to support the withdrawal and inspection of the missiles.

 

Plokhy goes into great detail as to how the unauthorized shooting down of an American U-2 by a local commander, an accidental overflight into Russia by a B-52 and the near use of a nuclear tipped torpedo in in a Russian sub could have led to a global conflagration. Sometimes the command and control in Washington D.C. and Moscow don’t work exactly as planned.

 

On the American side we see Kennedy moving from hawk to dove and we his constant looking over his shoulder on the domestic consequences of his actions. He is especially fearful of New York Senator Kenneth Keating pressing him on the missile issue prior to the enactment of the embargo.

 

In the end it was both Kennedy’s and Khrushchev’s fear of nuclear war that enabled the crisis to cool. Out of that came Khrushchev’s newfound respect for Kennedy and the treaty banning the atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons in 1963. I know haven’t done justice to Plokhy’s very fine book. At time when we worry about nuclear proliferation in Iran and North Korea his book is a worthwhile reminder of how things can go wrong.

For the full Amazon URL see: Khrushchev's Nuclear Gamble (amazon.com)