title: Kennedy and Khrushchev: 10. Fallout
author: The Bomb
contenttype: podcast
publication: The Bomb
published: 2026-02-02T01:30:00
sourceurl: http://open.live.bbc.co.uk/mediaselector/6/redir/version/2.0/mediaset/audio-nondrm-download-rss/proto/http/vpid/p0mwt12b.mp3
word_count: 6301
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It's why our world-class School of Medicine and adult and children's health systems work together, pioneering treatments, teaching the innovators of tomorrow, and delivering the best possible care today. Stanford Medicine, advancing knowledge, improving lives, Stanfordmedicine.org. It's late afternoon, 27th October, 1962, in the United States. The light is fading on black Saturday. In Moscow, the clock has ticked past midnight. My great grandfather, Nikita Khrushchev, has returned home late and is sitting down with his nighttime drink of tea and lemon. His day is not done. Just after 1am, Khrushchev gets a phone call. Khrushchev's message, the one written and rewritten the day before, with a Soviet ambassador in Cuba, has arrived. The Cuban leader tries to warn Khrushchev of the impending American attack and leads for a preemptive nuclear strike on the United States. Another telephone call comes soon afterwards, an American YouTube lane has been shot down. In his memoirs, Khrushchev will write, even a fool can start a war, and a wise man would find it difficult to bring that war to its end. From the BBC World Service, this is the bomb season 3, Kennedy and Khrushchev. With me, Nina Khrushchev. And me, Max Kennedy. Episode 10, fallout. The Oval Office, around 7pm, President Kennedy has gathered his closest advisors. McGeorge Bundy, Robert McNamara, Dean Rosk, and his brother, Robert Kennedy. What they're talking about will remain secret for 25 years. The President has approved a response to Khrushchev's most recent message. The United States will lift the naval blockade, and it will not attack Cuba, if the Soviet missiles are shut down. But he has not responded to Khrushchev's request on Saturday morning, that American Jupiter missiles in Turkey be removed. Doing that could damage US relations with Turkey and NATO. And there's no time left to negotiate. So in that classified meeting in the Oval Office, they decide that Robert Kennedy is going to convey a secret message in person to the Soviet ambassador, Anatoliy Dobrinin. This message is not to be made public. So elected members of the XCOM discussed, let's have Bobby tell the Soviets that we can't agree to it in writing. But if you remove your missiles from Cuba within four to five months, our missiles will be out of Turkey. If the secret deal becomes public, it will be denied. This is the final American offer. Khrushchev has 24 hours to respond. The Soviet missiles in Cuba for the American missiles, the obsolete missiles in Turkey, we're going to have that trade. It'll be secret, we can't acknowledge this publicly. But that's what we want to do. He has to hope that Khrushchev will respond favorably. At 7.15 pm, my father, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, summons the Soviet ambassador Dobrinin to his office at the Department of Justice. When Nikita Khrushchev first met Fidel Kaster in 1916 in Harlem, he'd seen him as a son, a communist son, a relationship that had begun with a bear hug in front of the press is about to be severely tested. The contents of Kaster's alarming message to Khrushchev, calling him to strike the USA first, begin to sing in. It terrifies him. The crisis is threatening to spin out of control, and Khrushchev does not want war. Jim Hirschberg. Khrushchev does not want a nuclear, thermonuclear confrontation with the United States, and he does not want to sacrifice the Soviet Union for Cuba. Khrushchev's reaction to the message is revealed in a conversation two days later. This is Sergey Rachenko, author of To Run the World, the Kremlin's cold war bid for global power. There's a very interesting conversation between Khrushchev and Navalny, the Czechoslovak leader, where he returns to this question of Kaster, and he says something like, only somebody who's completely blinded by revolutionary passion could propose something like that, like a preemptive strike on the United States. So effectively he thinks that Kaster is going crazy, and that he could not be trusted. This is from a secret document that was discovered in the archives in Prague, after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact. Khrushchev says the following. Fidel Castro proposed that we ourselves should be the first to start an atomic war. Do you know what that would mean? That probably cannot even be expressed at all. We were completely aghast. Castro clearly has no idea about what thermonuclear war is. After all, if a war started, it would primarily be Cuba that would vanish from the face of the earth. At the same time, it is clear that with a first strike, one cannot today knock the opponent out of the fight. There can always be a counter strike which can be devastating. What would we gain if we ourselves started a war? After all, millions of people would die. In our country too, can we even contemplate a thing like that? As Sunday dawns in Moscow, it is clear to Khrushchev that the situation in Cuba is getting dangerously out of control. Ambassador Anatoly Dobrinin arrives at Robert Kennedy's office at the Department of Justice at 7.45 pm. He immediately notices how tired my father looks as if he hasn't slept for days. In his memoir of the crisis, 13 days, my father describes this meeting. In that account, he does refer to the possibility of taking American missiles out of Turkey, but there's no mention of a secret deal. Robert Kennedy says he told Dobrinin that President Kennedy had been anxious to remove those missiles from Turkey and Italy for a long time. He'd ordered their removal some time ago, and it was our judgment that within a short time after the crisis was over, those missiles would be gone. But there are other accounts which reveal there was a clear verbal agreement. You withdraw your missiles from Cuba. I promise, orally, it's a verbal pledge, not a written pledge, that our missiles will be out of Turkey in four to five months. He was threatening that the US might launch an invasion in the next 12 to 24 hours, unless Khrushchev agreed to withdraw the missiles under UN inspection. And if he did so, he was effectively promising that within four or five months, the American missiles would be removed from Turkey, which of course is effectively a deal. Robert Kennedy tells Dobrinin that Khrushchev could not say this publicly, and if he did, the US agreement was canceled, and that agreement was censored when Robert Kennedy's 13 days was posthumously published. Theodore Sorenson, President Kennedy's speech writer, who edited the book after my father was killed, made sure to excise any mention of a direct promise. Over the missile swap. President Kennedy needs an answer the very next day, and Dobrinin fully understands that. But the communications available don't match the urgency of the situation. Evan Thomas. They have to send a telegram back. They call Western Union. That's how crude the communications were. They call the telegraph guy to come pick up the telegram, and they are watching the telegraph boy, as he was called then, get on his bicycle, and ride off to his office to send the telegram, and they worry that he's going to stop and see his girlfriend or, you know, have a Coca-Cola or something. The communications were that crude between the United States and Soviet Union. Chairman Khrushchev had initiated the crisis by breaking his word to President Kennedy. Now, the President hopes, but can only trust that Khrushchev will not reveal the deal. Some of those gathered in the White House think that Saturday evening might be their last meal. The Army, Navy, and Air Force are getting ready for what might follow if diplomacy fails. My father recalls we had not abandoned hope, but what hope there was rested with Khrushchev. The expectation was of a military confrontation the next morning. Nova Agariova, a country estate outside of Moscow. In the reception house, the Presidium gather at noon, hidden away from the foreign press. Premier Khrushchev opens the discussion and does most of the talking during a highly charged meeting that will last most of the day. Khrushchev's aide Alektyryanovsky recalls decades later that apart from a few comments from Anastas Mikhayan and Andrei Gramyka, the others are silent. The mood of the meeting, Trenovsky says, is, you go us into this mess, now you get us out of it. Khrushchev has received President Kennedy's official letter, demanding the dismantling of the missile bases, but giving assurances that he won't invade Cuba. It offers Khrushchev a potential solution. He sees how things have gone wrong on October 27th and then he is fear of war. He just thought that, you know, perhaps humans were not as rational as he would want them to be. He decides that the gamble is not worth it. Nothing is worth a nuclear war and he reasonably backs off. As Khrushchev is telling his colleagues that he plans to dismantle the missile installations, there is a phone call. A coded telegram has arrived from Dobrinyan, reporting what Robert Kennedy has told him in a private meeting, including the offer of a secret deal. Time is running out. Khrushchev needs to agree to withdraw the missiles. My brother is under intense pressure to invade Cuba. And by some accounts, he says, you only have 24 to 48 hours or something like that. Khrushchev would remember the message is even threatening, you know, the military wants to take over from my brother in order to attack you. But in any case, the idea is to convey US determination to get the missiles out and tell Khrushchev that he needs to act fast. And part of the warning is that if there's another shooting down of an American plane, then the US will have to respond. As the preceding discuss the response, there is another phone call. Intelligence has come in. Kennedy is going to address the nation at 5 p.m. Moscow time, 9 a.m. in Washington. In the room they wonder, is he going to announce an attack on the missiles and Cuba? Nikita Khrushchev moves fast. He needs to get a message to Kennedy before he begins his speech. Cable de Brinion, he orders Grammica, tell Robert Kennedy that Moscow is prepared to accept his brother's conditions and agrees to keep the Turkey discussions confidential. Khrushchev calls for a stenographer and dictates an official letter to the president. The foreign minister in Moscow calls the US embassy telling them to expect an important message in one and a half hours. In Washington, it's early Sunday morning. I had promised my daughters for a long time that I would take them to the Horseshow, writes my father in 13 days. And I went to the Washington Armory to watch the horses jump. In any case, there was nothing I could do but wait. Across the river at the Pentagon, Robert McNamara and Maxwell Taylor get ready to meet with Curtis Lemay and the other joint chiefs of the military to prepare the strike on Cuba. It's scheduled for Tuesday, but Curtis Lemay thinks the operation should be brought forward. Tomorrow is the last day to attack before those missiles become operational. He's decided. President Kennedy is going to go to church, and he's preparing to make the short walk down Pennsylvania Avenue to Sunday Mass. At the preceding meeting at Nova Agariova, Fidel Castro's telegram is laid out on the long oak table. In his memoirs, Khrushchev recalls that when it was read out to the room, we set there in silence, looking at one another for a long time. It became clear that Castro absolutely did not understand our intentions. Khrushchev dictates a reply to the Cuban leader, show patience, restraint, and more restraint. Then an instruction for General Peef, the head of Soviet forces in Cuba. Khrushchev tells him he was too hasty in shooting down the U-2, and he orders, dismantled the R-12s, and removed them, led the United Nations into the missile sites. The 5 p.m. deadline is approaching. He has to take action to prevent escalating into war, especially if the Americans are about to invade. And so on Sunday morning, the 28th, Washington time, late afternoon Sunday, Moscow time, Khrushchev sends out an announcement on radio Moscow, agreeing to remove the missiles. Diplomatic channels are too slow to get Khrushchev's letter through to Kennedy in time. They decide to use radio Moscow to broadcast the essence of the message, but the studios are a 45-minute drive away. Soviet officials edit the letter and translate it into English. Copies are given to the Communist Party Secretary in charge of ideology, Lianyev Deličov. He orders his chauffeur to drive as fast as he can to the radio Moscow studios in the center of the city. Anatoly Gripkov, Soviet Army Chief and key architect of Operation Anadir, would later recall the mood of the meeting that Sunday afternoon. Nuclear catastrophe was hanging by just a threat. We weren't counting days or hours, but minutes. Ilicov arrives at radio Moscow in record time, his black limousine waved through by the militia. The text is handed to the chief announcer, Yuri Levitan. Levitan announced the start of the war with Nazi Germany in 1941, the death of Stalin in 1953, and Yuri Gagarin's space flight in 1961. At 5 p.m., he begins another historic broadcast. Gavarit Moscow, this is Moscow speaking. Radio Moscow. In addition to instructions earlier transmitted, to stop construction work on installations in Cuba, the Soviet government has ordered that it's mantling of weapons in Cuba, as well as their crating and return to the Soviet Union. True crime meets history with a twist in a new series of Lady Killers. Join me as we travel back in time to investigate the most astonishing Lady Killers of the 19th and 20th centuries. We visit the scene of the crime, and we delve deep into their lives to ask, how did they do it? Why did they do it? What drove them to it? Watch Lady Killers with Lucy Wesley on BBC.com. It all starts with a subscription to BBC.com. Find out more at BBC.com slash unlimited. President Kennedy is about to leave for mass at St. Stephen the Martyr Catholic Church. There's a phone call. McGeorge Bundy tells him. Krushchev has accepted his proposal, and is dismantling the missile sites. It's over. I feel like a new man now, the president says. The planned 9 a.m. television broadcast by President Kennedy that's so frightened Moscow, turns out to be a false alarm. In fact, it was just a scheduled repeat broadcast of his address on the crisis from the week before. My father, still at the Washington Armory horse show, is ushered to a landline for a phone call from Dean Rusk at 10 a.m. The Russians have agreed to withdraw the missiles from Cuba. I went immediately to the White House, he recalls, where Dobreenin visits him again an hour later. He told me that everything was going to work out satisfactorily, and that Mr. Krushchev wanted to send his best wishes to the president and to me. When Dobreenin writes his report for Moscow, he says it's the first time in weeks that he has seen Robert Kennedy smiling. Krushchev's announcement is reported around the world to international relief, and to many he's seen as a peacemaker. But in Cuba, it's a different matter, but he's not the killer. Kastra hears about the deal that Krushchev has made with Kennedy from Carlos Franchi, who is the editor of Revolution newspaper. Carlos Franchi calls Castro, who was in a meeting with his other leadership, and he says, Fidel, I just heard the news over the wires, what's your response? And Fidel says, what news? And Carlos Franchi has to tell him, then, that he has found out through the international wires that Krushchev has agreed to remove his missiles. And Castro is furious. He slams the telephone down, and he kicks the wall, and it breaks this giant mirror, and he swears, and he feels ignored over the future of his own country. Kastra hasn't been consulted, and now he will not cooperate. He won't agree to let the United Nations inspect the dismantling of the missiles on his own territory, one of the conditions of the Krushchev candidate deal. He feels like a pawn. I've never seen him so dispirited. The Soviet ambassador Alexei reports back to Moscow. Castro sees it as a humiliation. He feels completely betrayed by his communist, allegedly comrade, who turned into a sort of imperialist patron who was making decisions about Cuba without even asking Cuban leadership what they thought about that. Sergei Plogi, author of Nuclear Folly. So his revolt is really revolt against the new superpower that treats Cuba as its colony or semi colony. The Soviet troops who work through tropical storms to construct the missile sites as fast as possible have to dismantle them at even greater speed. They begin the morning after the Krushchev candidate deal. They complete the job within a week. Kastra refuses to budge. He won't allow inspection of any missile sites on Cuban territory. So Krushchev has to agree to let his ships returning to the Soviet Union with the missiles in nuclear warheads be inspected in international waters instead. When the thousands of Soviet troops embark on those ships heading home, Cuban dignitaries refuse to give them an official send-off. A lot of people across the island feel betrayed. They feel abandoned. There are stories of Cuban citizens begging the Soviets who are packing up the missiles not to leave to stay and help protect them. But there's also a sense of relief. And even people like Che Guevara who has dedicated his life to revolution and made it clear that he's willing to sacrifice himself. Immediately upon learning that Krushchev is removing the missiles, he goes to his ex-wife's house to visit his six-year-old daughter. He picks up his little daughter and he says, we've come really close to war and we have found a peaceful resolution now. And you'll get to live another day. He's clearly very relieved that his daughter won't die in an attack or in a nuclear war. All the neighbors are there. They're all in the room and his ex-wife is there. And he, even if he's disappointed with the geopolitical situation, he's relieved that he and the people he loves will survive. Krushchev sends Anastas Mikayan to Havana to try to calm Kastra down and coax him to cooperate with American demands. Mikayan, whose wife dies while he's in Cuba, has to stay there for most of November, dealing with an extremely tense situation. When President Kennedy insists that Soviet bombers be removed along with missiles, it's another sticking point for Kastra. But he eventually gives in, and on November 20th, Kennedy announces that the naval blockade of Cuba will be lifted. American nuclear forces are taken off alert. Kastra is reconciled with Krushchev within a few months, touring the USSR in the early summer of 1963. The Cuban leader is keen to build bridges and desperate for economic aid. So Krushchev got what he wanted. American rockets were drawn from Turkey, but it wasn't a public information. And Kennedy, of course, publicly was a victor in this because the Soviets withdrew their rockets from Cuba. And it was a big deal. It was done in the open. How was President Kennedy seen after the Cuban missile crisis was resolved? I think it was a really important outcome for President Kennedy. It was seen as a victory in the United States. And I think it strengthened his hand with the Senate and with the House. I think it put him in a better position to help gain passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act and the work that they were doing on that. It helped enormously in terms of support for his foreign policy that made him more popular with a broader segment of the American people. We had talked about no leader wants to be seen as weak. And he was seen as strong, reliable, and the American people could trust him to negotiate on our behalf. And I think it was enormously helpful throughout the rest of his administration. John F. Kennedy finds his position strengthened. The situation for Nikita Khrushchev is more complicated. My great-grandfather, too, claims it as a victory. The aim was to save Cuba. And he has done that. The missiles will be out of Turkey. But the world doesn't know that yet. Khrushchev's colleagues in the Presidium know all about the Turkey agreement. But they still don't see it as a win. It's something they use against him in 1964 when they oust him from power. Exactly two years after the Soviet missiles were discovered in Cuba. I talked about it with Sergei Raichinka. All of those people were basically lieutenants, but still Khrushchev needed to convince them, I think, that there was a positive outcome for the Soviet Union in this whole situation. So Kennedy made the public pledge not to invade Cuba, but privately also agreed to withdraw missiles from Turkey, which Roshchev thought was a gigantic success because it showed that equalized the Soviet Union in the United States. And this is what he was trying to sell. Unfortunately, he couldn't tell that to Castro, but he could tell that to his comrades at the Presidiums. And look, we have not been defeated because the Americans are also taking their missiles out of Turkey. That was hugely important for her show because that allowed him to get a victory out of this situation. He thought to sell it to his colleagues and to himself. But actually, I mean, I agree with you, but I also want to clarify this because Khrushchev, yes, he did need to sell it, but he also didn't, because he thought that he got what he wanted. So he came up with a Cuban missile crisis to get parity. He got parity. Everybody else told him that it was a defeat. Everybody else said, how could you make Soviet Union appear as weakened? And in fact, as I'm sure you've read transcript of October 13, 14, 1964, exactly. And this came up. That came up and his response was, what did you want me to do? Start World War Three? Exactly. But you almost get a sense that he does protest too much. If you have to keep saying that it's such a victory, surely part of you thinks that it was actually not a victory. And it's clear that the Cubans don't think it's a victory. They think that the Soviet Union was... But Americans think it is a victory, which is already a defeat for the Soviet Union. I mean, but taking a few steps back, looking in this whole situation, in the end, you can argue today that perhaps it was a victory because after all, Cuba remained. Because Khrushchev keeps his word and doesn't make the deal over Turkey public. Future deals with Canada become possible. The Gulf of mutual suspicion, competition and mistrust between them begins to fade. It's almost a parable of a father and son, where there's one is being overbearing and the other is being rebellious, and then they see the humanity in each other, see themselves in each other and come together and do something that's bigger than any of them. Which is interesting because Kennedy, after the Vienna meeting, compared Khrushchev to the father, when he told Robert that Kennedy, that he's like father, he's pushing and pressing and doesn't listen to arguments. And that personal part very rarely discussed in politics. We kind of never look at politics from that perspective. So I think the Cuban Missile Crisis could be another lesson in that. They saw each other's pressures and they saw each other's problems because one of the things that Khrushchev did, which I find today, especially in today's environment, improbable that Kennedy agreed to withdraw. American weapons were already withdrawing from Turkey, but he agreed to withdraw them. But he also said that he cannot be public. And Khrushchev agreed and appreciated what he could do from his position to not damage Kennedy's reputation. Which now I don't know how many leaders we would see in the world who would agree. I think it's more important today for people to come out as a victor rather than whatever else happens. And so in this sense, it's also a great lesson in kind of political understanding of an adversary's position. Towards the end of 13 days, my father, Robert Kennedy, has a chapter called some of the things we learned. The final lesson of the Cuban Missile Crisis, he says, is the importance of placing ourselves in the other countries' shoes. On the 13th day of that crisis in the Oval Office, the XCOM are celebrating after hearing about Khrushchev's announcement, but President Kennedy is keen to avoid self-congratulation. He presses stop on the recording of that meeting. It's the last one they have during the critical phase of the crisis. I think John of Kennedy comes out of this crisis. Relieved, I think he comes out of it chasinged. Fred Logovall, President Kennedy's biographer. I think he understands how close the world came, how close he came, and his Soviet counterpart came to an absolutely disastrous, existential result that would have been dreadful for humanity. And I think he comes out of this with a determination to bring him out some changes to the superpower relationship. Khrushchev does too. I want to give both of them credit for realizing that we came close here. We can't know exactly how close, but we came close enough. And we've got to take steps to change the nature of the superpower relationship to reduce the tensions. And what happens over the course of 1963 is a number of steps are taken by both of them to lower the temperature. One of the most important lessons that they learned was there was a need for quicker communications between Moscow and Washington DC. That's the origin of the hotline. After that, the United States and the Soviet Union put in a special dedicated hotline between the Kremlin and Washington's actually a teletype machine so that we don't have, we don't have to depend on on a telegraph getting through. And that is an important step in sort of coming down the Cold War. The hotline is installed in 1963. A similar model is in the John F. Kennedy Library and Museum in Boston. I've always thought of the hotline as a red telephone that sits on the president's desk. And I swear, I think I've seen one on the desk. So I don't know what it is at this point, but at that point, it was just a teletype machine, which are fairly gigantic. This one is the size of a secretary desk. It's all steel and it's in sort of military drab green, the color of all government offices in the 1950s and early 1960s. And it's got a keyboard on it, a typical Quarty QWERTY keyboard with five or six additional buttons send break. And I, apparently, the first message that was sent was the message that all American school students are taught when learning to type. And it's used even for second and third graders to test whether you can write all your letters. So the first message sent from the White House to the Kremlin by this device was the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog. And Foreign Minister Andre Grameco remembered reading it at the time and calling Dean Rusk back and saying, what does it mean when your people say that the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog. So even with this device, there was still profound miscommunications between, I guess they wanted to send something that wasn't offensive in any way, but it seemed to everybody that they had sent something in code, I guess, or a metaphor. A political relationship can grow out of a crisis. Canadian cruise ships letters chart that evolution from Kennedy's election win in November 1960 to his assassination in Dallas three years later. There are some historians who have suggested that the Cold War in a sense came to an end or at least Cold War one almost ended in 1963. I would not go that far because of everything that is still to come, but it does speak to important changes in the superpower relationship over the course of 1963. What's interesting to me is that when John F. Kennedy undertook a campaign, an early campaign trip in the late summer early fall of 1963. So just two months before his death, he traveled to the mountain west and he didn't expect that this would happen, but when he gave speeches in that part of the country, emphasizing the need for peace, people just went crazy. I have therefore chosen this time in place to discuss a topic on which ignorance too often abounds and the truth to rarely perceived. And that is the most important topic on earth, peace. The enthusiasm for this message was something that neither he nor his advisors expected. And I think it was an eye opener for him so that the American University speech, one of the great speeches in I think American political history, that he had given in June, June 10th, arguing for a new commitment on the part of the superpowers to a better relationship had really resonated. I speak of peace because of the new face of war. Total war makes no sense in an age where great powers can maintain large and relatively invulnerable nuclear forces and refuse to surrender without resort to those forces. It makes no sense in an age where a single nuclear weapon contains almost ten times the explosive force delivered by all the Allied air forces in the Second World War. It makes no sense in an age when the deadly poisons produced by a nuclear exchange would be carried by wind and water and soil and seed to the far corners of the globe and the generations yet unborn. Amazing. It's just amazing and so I sometimes think to myself how he lived, how he returned from Dallas alive, what would have resulted? We can't know. There's the question obviously of Vietnam which is a very important one as far as that counterfactual goes. But I think more broadly this response to him on this early campaign swing added to the concrete steps that Moscow and Washington had taken added to the American University speech tells me that there were opportunities that might have been grasped to further this changed international environment had he come back from Texas alive. So Krushyv loved the speech so much. So great. That's so nice isn't it? In the universe of the Cold War he published in Pravda the whole speech of the American president with no blackouts. It's just the whole speech that he did. And if we cannot end now our differences at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For in the final analysis our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's futures and we are all mortal. Ted Sorensen whom I knew a bit. He probably knew him too. Yeah. He was a great man and so he told me that as a speech writer he knew when he wrote that speech for president Kennedy he used a lot of Krushyv words in from Krushyv speeches. And Krushyv recognized his own offers to the United States in the way Kennedy then spoke to the Soviet Union. It was the way Sorensen described it was like walking on steps. So he offered in Kennedy's speech he offered Krushyv steps with which he can get closer to Kennedy. And Krushyv was completely flattered by this when he read this speech. I said that in 59. I said it in 62. And so when he was so flattered they made this speech published. It's so thoughtful and it just shows you that if you're willing to work for peace and have some humility going forward you can make so much progress. President Kennedy announces in that June 1963 speech that the United States and the Soviet Union have resumed negotiations on a treaty banning nuclear weapons testing. Between the two superpowers there had been more than 170 tests the previous year alone spewing radiation across the planet. The two leaders have reopened their dialogue in a series of private letters. In place of rivalry they're talking about progress. Just over a month later on July 25th 1963 the two nations along with Britain agreed to ban nuclear testing in the atmosphere in space and underwater but not underground. The partial test ban treaty is signed in Moscow in August. It's an important step towards arms control. It drastically reduces the levels of radioactive fallout in the earth's atmosphere. Nikita Krushyv summed up the crisis like this. The two most powerful nations had been squared off against each other each with its finger on the button. John F. Kennedy also remarked it is insane that two men sitting on opposite sides of the world should be able to decide to bring an end to civilization. It was an extraordinary and terrifying standoff and through it the leaders of the two most powerful nations on earth had come to see each other as human beings. And America was becoming less of an adversary and so in some ways as drastic as Krushyv's methods were they seemed to have brought results. That they were plans being made that President Kennedy would finally come and visit the Soviet Union and my favorite story that my grandmother would tell me is that because Jacqueline Kennedy was the most elegant woman in the universe my grandmother when they met in 61 they discussed fashion but also my grandmother was in this very flowery dress that then was maligned all over the world because Jacqueline Kennedy was such a fashionably dressed woman and grandmother looked like grandmother. Grandmother said we learned a lesson. We were not going to be bumpkins country bumpkins. They were my mother and so three girls and they spent almost the whole year talking about this of how they're going to be greeting Jacqueline Kennedy and how great they would look and how they would exchange fashion tips and when they got the news that President Kennedy was killed one of the daughters said well I guess Jacqueline Kennedy will never come to Moscow and it would never exchange fashion tips since she started crying. That's a beautiful story thank you. You didn't know it you didn't hear it no that they were going to come and if this the whole family was preparing it's so nice so nice grandmother was in love with Jackie just absolutely in love that was episode 10 of 10 the final episode of the bomb season three Kennedy and Khrushchev presented by me Nina Khrushcheva and me Max Kennedy thanks to the archivists and staff of the John F. Kennedy Library and Museum in Boston and the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation. The producer is Megan Jones the editor is Chris Ledjard the production coordinator is Stuart Laws research by Minnie Harapin Isabel Eaton. The story editor is Kate Lee's music composed by Elizabeth Pernell the theme is by Trevor Gurekis and Dixie is assistant editor for BBC World Service Podcasts. Sound designed by Tim Nielsen as Guy Walker Sound the sound supervisor is Catherine Robinson the commissioning editor is Simon Pitts. The bomb Kennedy and Khrushchev is a BBC audio Wales production for the BBC World Service. The two previous seasons of the bomb are also available to listen to right now. True crime meets history with a twist in a new series of Lady Killers. Join me as we travel back in time to investigate the most astonishing Lady Killers of the 19th and 20th centuries we visit the scene of the crime and we delve deep into their lives to ask how did they do it? Why did they do it? What drove them to it? Watch Lady Killers with Lucy Wesley on BBC dot com. It all starts with a subscription to BBC dot com. Find out more at BBC dot com slash unlimited.