W. W. Norton & Company
Nuclear Folly: A History of the Cuban Missile Crisis
Key Metrics
- Serhii Plokhy
- W. W. Norton & Company
- Hardcover
- 9780393540819
- -
- -
- History > Caribbean & West Indies - Cuba
- English
Secure TransactionBook Description
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.
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.
Drawing on a range of Soviet archival sources, including previously classified KGB documents, as well as White House tapes, Plokhy masterfully illustrates the drama and anxiety of those tense days, and provides a way for us to grapple with the problems posed in our present day.
Author Bio
Serhii Plokhy is author, teacher, and historian and specializes in the history of Eastern Europe with a special focus on Ukraine.
He is Mykhailo S. Hrushevs'kyi Professor of Ukrainian History at Harvard University and Director of Ukrainian Research Institute.
Professor Plokhy's research interests include the intellectual, cultural, and international history of Eastern Europe, with an emphasis on Ukraine and teaches courses and seminars on early modern and modern East European history that engage major problems in the history of Ukraine, Russia, Belarus, Poland, and Lithuania.
His select list of publications include
- The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine Basic Books (2015)
- The Last empire: The Final Days of the Soviet Union Basic Books (2015)
- The Cossack Myth: History and Nationhood in the Age of Empires Cambridge University Press (2012)
- Yalta: The Price of Peace Viking/Penguin (2010; 2011)
- Ukraine and Russia: Representations of the Past University of Toronto Press (2008)
- The Origins of the Slavic Nations: Premodern Identities in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus Cambridge University Press (2006)
Source: Harvard University Department of History
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