Illustration for review of “Nuclear Folly: A History of the Cuban Crisis” by Sehii Plokhy. 25nuclear; BOOKS; 4-25-21BRIAN STAUFFER for The Boston Globe
The viewers of Craig Mazin’s fascinating miniseries “Chernobyl” from 2019 and readers of Eric Schlosser’s brilliant, utterly terrifying 2013 book “Command and Control” will hear “Nuclear Power” and think of “Accident, Incompetence, Mismanagement”. But an earlier generation would have thought something completely different. You would have heard “nuclear power” and thought: “nuclear war”.
And the characteristic focus of this earlier specter will always be the Cuban Missile Crisis, which hit the world in October 1962 when a US U2 spy plane revealed the construction of Soviet missile delivery facilities in the Cuban countryside about 50 miles from Havana. The missiles were a Soviet response to the presence of Jupiter missiles in Italy and Turkey. Since they were only 100 miles from Florida and could easily reach Washington with their payloads, President John F. Kennedy could not ignore their presence in Cuba.
The following month of escalating tensions is the subject of the exciting new book “Nuclear Folly: A History of the Cuban Crisis” by Harvard history professor Serhii Plokhy, which traces the incident from its deep background to its minute unfolding. Plokhy consults a variety of sources, including newly opened KGB files, and attempts to reverse what he describes as the dominant narrative of the event, which he sums up as follows: “John Kennedy refused to budge, and thanks to the decision-making process, on The advisors involved in his closest associate managed to make the right assumptions and draw the right conclusions about the intentions and capabilities of the Soviets in order to resolve the crisis. “
Although there is little overturning of this narrative in Plokhy’s account, the Cuban Missile Crisis has not had such a granular and intricate story since 1997, “One Hell of a Gamble” by Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali. This latest chronicle meets the needs of bashing the first report in which Plokhy describes “Thirteen Days: A Memory of the Cuban Crisis” by Robert Kennedy as “often selfish and inaccurate,” but “Nuclear Folly” goes way beyond filling in the details, that Robert Kennedy so vigorously left off; Plokhy’s book is populated with a large number of well-drawn characters – including some, like Lyndon B. Johnson, vice president of JFK, who didn’t particularly emphasize this in most previous versions.
On these pages we get a quick overview of familiar events: the tight diplomatic exchange, the imposition of a blockade around the island of Cuba by the USA, the pressure that Kennedy felt from his military commanders and civil advisers, the failed attempts of some Soviet ships to order test the strength of the blockage. The most ineradicable aspect for anyone who has lived through this month: the oppressive, almost unbearable fear that the United States and the Soviet Union are inexorably headed for all-out nuclear war. When a solution finally came – when Soviet Prime Minister Nikita Khrushchev agreed to remove his missiles from Cuba and cease efforts to make a military stop so close to the US mainland – the collective sigh of relief was practically audible in orbit.
In private, Kennedy and Khrushchev were just as shocked as the rest of the world at how close the events of the disaster had come. They accelerated talks on strengthening control over their respective nuclear programs, and those talks eventually led to the 1963 Partial Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty. And these episodes preoccupy Plokhy a lot in the course of his book. As is known, the specific story he tells has a happy ending, although Plokhy himself is sardonically dead on that point. “John Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev managed to avoid nuclear war,” he writes, “after making almost every conceivable mistake and every conceivable step to cause it.” Despite all that guilt (conveyed here by the fictional nuances readers will remember from Plokhy’s great book The Man With the Poison Gun), there was also a ragged kind of hope, a tactical combination of fellowship and odds that made it Avoid the worst possible outcome.
But Plokhy doesn’t allow his readers the same deep breath – far from it. Instead, he reminds them that even though the Cold War is long over, the threat of nuclear war only increases. In August 2019, the United States withdrew from the Treaty on Medium-Range Nuclear Forces with Russia, which was drawn up in 1987 between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev. This withdrawal has left virtually no international guard rails against the proliferation of nuclear weapons, and Plokhy does not shred words: “We are now officially at the beginning of an uncontrolled nuclear arms race.”
“If mankind is fortunate enough to survive the new atomic age and live another thirty or forty million years,” writes Plokhy, “future geologists studying ice cores, corals and rocks will still be able to to determine the time when the Kennedy- The Khrushchev Treaty was signed. ”If the rock layer is not to be buried by a much thicker layer that signals the moment when humanity killed itself,“ Nuclear Folly reminds us “Because now is the time to study – and to act.
Steve Donoghue is a Boston-based reviewer and editor.
Nuclear Folly: A History of the Cuban Crisis
By Serhii Plokhy
WW Norton, 444 pages, $ 35
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