title: Kennedy and Khrushchev: 9. Black Saturday
author: The Bomb
contenttype: podcast
publication: The Bomb
published: 2026-01-26T01:30:00
sourceurl: http://open.live.bbc.co.uk/mediaselector/6/redir/version/2.0/mediaset/audio-nondrm-download-rss/proto/http/vpid/p0mvc69c.mp3
word_count: 5731
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Together, we're pioneering treatments for patients of all ages, fighting cancers with cutting-edge cell therapies that are more effective with fewer side effects, shaping the future of health while making a difference today. Stanford Medicine, advancing knowledge in proving lives. Stanfordmedicine.org This episode contains strong language. It's midnight in Fairbanks, Alaska, where Captain Charles Maltzby is preparing to take off in a U2 spy plane. He's heading for the North Pole to take samples of air and atmospheric dust. It's part of the top secret project Stardust. What he collects will be analyzed for evidence of Soviet nuclear detonations. His compass does not work near the magnetic North Pole, so he has to navigate with a sextant, leaning like an 18th century sea captain, using only the stars as his guide. But when the vivid pinks and greens of the northern lights brighten the sky, Maltzby can no longer see the stars, and his plane strays dangerously off course towards the Soviet Union. Saturday, October 27th, will become known as Black Saturday. The tensest point of the crisis, arguably the most dangerous day in human history. From the BBC World Service, this is the bomb. Season 3, Kennedy and Khrushchev. Episode 9, Black Saturday. With me, Nina Khrushcheva, and me, Max Kennedy. Cuba, early hours of Saturday, Soviet officers are expecting an attack at daybreak. They work through the night and get no sleep. Nuclear warheads have been brought out of a bunker in the middle of the island, and are being transported through the mountains to one of the missile sites. It's called Sagwala Grande in central Cuba. They're brought from their storage depot at a place called Behukal. It takes about 15-16 hours for a convoy of trucks together with the warheads to reach Sagwala Grande from Behukal. And at that point, they're not actually mated with the missiles. They still have to be mated with the missiles, and that process is going to take about four hours. I talked to one of the officers who was responsible for doing that, and he says, yeah, one point, we were three or four hours away from being able to launch missiles at the United States. That was on Black Saturday, October 27th, 1962. The American overflights have intensified. The sky seems to be full of crusader planes, criss-crossing the island, flying in Paris over their heads. Caster has given an order to use anti-aircraft guns to fire at low flying planes. At dawn, with the first rays of sun, suddenly we hear a very intense noise, as if it were thunder, prolonged thunder. It's a deafening noise. We immediately realized that they were American planes and began to try to get the cannons in place. It was a teenager at the time, undergoing military training and stationed with an anti-aircraft battery in Sagula Grande. Plains came in flying low from the west. Immediately, the commander of the battery gave the order to fire. One plane was flying low on the other at a higher altitude. 20 projectiles came out quickly and exploded between the two planes. One plane maneuvered down on the other climbs, but the projectiles did not hit either plane. For ordinary Cubans too, the tension is almost unbearable. By the morning of Saturday, October 27th, the mood across Cuba is pretty grim. It's raining, it's been raining all week. People have been living under the stress of a fearing and evasion or attack at any minute for days at this point. This is Professor Renata Keller, author of The Fate of the Americas, the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Hemispheric Cold War. People's nerves are so frayed after all this stress that they're almost ready to snap. After no sleep, with all the noise and a tropical storm setting in, it's hard to know whether or not the actual attack has begun. Orlando Florida, McCoy Air Force Base. Another U2 reconnaissance plane is getting ready to take off. The pilot is Major Rudolph Anderson Jr., a veteran of the Korean War. He's 35 years old. Anderson's mission is to photograph Soviet military sites surrounding the American naval base at Guantanamo on the eastern tip of Cuba. He'll be within range of the Soviet air defense tracking system and surface-to-air missiles. As he climbs into the cockpit, Anderson carries in his wallet photographs of his wife Jane and their young children. He takes off at 909 AM and enters Cuban airspace less than an hour later. It's noon in Moscow. Khrushchev has again spent a troubled night in his study in the Kremlin. Down the corridor, the preceding gather in the wood paneled conference room. The first point for discussion is an alarming update from General Plief in Cuba. Plief says he believes the Americans know where the Soviet nuclear installations are located. If they attack the missile installations as expected, he says he will shoot down their planes. Khrushchev approves this, but he also sends Plief another urgent cable. It is categorically confirmed that it is forbidden to use nuclear weapons without approval from Moscow, confirmed receipt. Khrushchev believes there is still time for negotiation and that he can get something else out of Kennedy before withdrawing the missiles. By this point, it was clear that the missiles had become a huge problem. And so Khrushchev was quarterly looking for some compensation for withdrawing the missiles. Jim Hirschberg, Professor of History and International Affairs at George Washington University. Walter Whitman, one of the most prominent journalists in the United States, suggests a trade of the US Jupiter medium-range ballistic missiles in Turkey for the Soviet ballistic missiles in Cuba. It is now known that there were members of the ex-com and of the Kennedy administration who had been making the comparison between the two missiles from early on in the crisis, even before Kennedy's speech, and that rumors of this connection had possibly reached the Soviet embassy in Washington and been reported to Moscow. Khrushchev wonders could the Walter Whitman column be deliberate tactic by Washington to test the water on Turkey. The long letter he sent to Kennedy the day before, pleading with Kennedy, to untie the north of war, talked vaguely about removing military specialists in the United States guaranteed not to invade Cuba. Now he thinks he should come clean about the deployment of Soviet R-12 missiles in Cuba. He will offer to remove them, and in return, on top of the promise not to invade the island, he wants to ask for the elimination of the American Jupiter missile bases in Turkey. Those missiles have been on his mind since the moment in Varna, on the Black Sea, that he decided to set the whole Cuban operation in motion. Khrushchev dictates a new message to Kennedy in the presence of the Presidium. He needs to get it to the White House before Kennedy responds to his previous letter, and before any possible attack. So he sends it to radio Moscow. It's broadcast at 5 pm Moscow time, 10 am in Washington. The Soviets are sending mixed signals and there's confusion in the White House. News associations are reporting that Khrushchev has told President Kennedy that he'll withdraw offensive weapons from Cuba, but only if the United States pulls its rockets out of Turkey. President Kennedy is talking with some of the members of the ex-com when he gets the news. They're still digesting Khrushchev's long letter of the previous day, and there's no mention of Turkey in that document. The President quickly realizes the Khrushchev may be putting out another letter. When they finally receive it, the men are stunned. It's much shorter than the Friday letter, and the Friday letter is much more personal. And so some in Washington believe that the Saturday letter might have been written by committee, and there's even wondering about has Khrushchev been overthrown? Is he not fully in charge? In other words, the discrepancy between the Friday and Saturday letters in style in addition to length is so striking. And also, of course, there's a tougher term, the Turkey demand. Is introduced into the Saturday letter, people are very unsure what is going on. They're really mystified. It seems like a shift from the night before. My father, Robert Kennedy, has begun the day with alarming news from J. Edgar Hoover at the FBI. Soviet personnel in New York are destroying their documents. That means they think they're on the verge of war. The formal letter from Khrushchev adds to my father's sense of foreboding. But he doesn't think the Turkey demand is unreasonable. Nor does his brother, the president. For a week now, the idea of a missile swap has been forming in his mind ever since a conversation with his friend, David Ormsby Gore, the UK ambassador to Washington. An early idea is planted that maybe some kind of trade of missiles will give the Soviets an off ramp, will give Khrushchev something that he can claim here, and it really won't hurt our strategic position. On the morning of Saturday the 27th, President Kennedy comes to realize that the missile swap may be the only hope for a diplomatic resolution of the crisis. The rockets in Turkey are obsolete anyway. He tells his age that he sees it as a very fair trade, but he struggles to convince any of them. And so the debate in the XCOM continues, and these men are getting pretty tired. Nobody's sleeping very well. People are sleeping in their offices, and they're worried that they're on the edge of the end of the world. I spoke to my father's biographer, Evan Thomas, about this stage of the crisis. There's even a discussion in the XCOM about evacuating American cities, because the Soviet missiles in Cuba can go about a thousand miles, and that can wipe out a lot of cities pretty much everything in the Southern United States. So there's talk in the XCOM about evacuating American cities, because if there is a missile strike, it could kill 50, 60 million Americans. That's a pretty grim conversation, that if they make the wrong move here, the missiles are going to fly, and we're going to be in a full-scale nuclear confrontation with the Soviet Union. One day, one of the State Department officials wakes up and sleeping in his office and says to the Secretary of State, we may have had to sleep in our offices, but we're still alive today. We didn't die. That's how scared they are or how anxious they are that things are going to go awry. President Kennedy has to leave the cabinet room for a meeting with state governors from across the United States. They've been summoned to Washington to discuss civil defense preparations in case of nuclear war. The White House calculates 92 million Americans are within range of the new missiles on Cuba. There aren't enough fallout shelters and food supplies. No one knows how to evacuate an entire city under a missile strike. In Cuba, because of the rain, which is getting worse, general belief thinks an attack is getting less likely. Suffering from kidney disease and exhausted by the tension of the previous 24 hours, he needs to sleep and retreats to his bunker. It's 9 a.m. in Havana when radar picks up on an aircraft flying towards the eastern tip of the island. Major Anderson's U2 plane has been spotted. If his pictures get back to Washington and show that the missile sites are ready to be paired with nuclear warheads, the power of the Soviet nuclear threat from Cuba will be exposed. The Soviets are primed to attack aircraft flying over Cuba. This surface-to-air missiles are ready to fire, but they need permission from general plea if to shoot down the plane. The general only has approval from cruise shift to fire at planes in self-defense. A phone call to plea if is answered by General Gréchka, his duty officer. Gréchka doesn't know what to do. He discusses it with his colleague at the headquarters, General Garbus. Sergei Plogi, author of Nuclear Folly. And those generals, again, that's the generation that went through the World War II, they believed that if their positions were uncovered by the aircraft, immediately after that would come either bombers or in the conditions of 1962 missiles. Without the knowledge of plea of or cruise shift, the order to fire at the U2 is given at 10.19 a.m. Havana time. It's 11.19 in Washington and 8.19 p.m. in Moscow. A group of Soviet officers later visited the site where the U2 crashed, finding undecensed documents and personal belongings. Colonel Varankov, the commander of the division that shot down the plane, sends a telegram to plea if. On October 27, 1962, it 10 hours 21 minutes, a violating U2 reconnaissance aircraft of the U.S. Air Force was destroyed. It was piloted by Captain R. Anderson. It takes more than five hours when used to reach the White House. There's nothing like the American Express Platinum Cart. Find out your welcome offer after you apply, which could be as high as 175,000 points. Learn more and find out your offer at AmericanExpress.com slash Explore- Platinum, Terms Apply. 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. Public in Moscow. He wants to accept Khrushchev's proposal, but the rest of the ex-con tells him it would look like a betrayal to take the American missiles out of Turkey, as though the United States was deserting Europe and NATO, leaving them vulnerable to the Soviet nuclear threat. At a separate meeting in a top secret Pentagon conference room, the United States Air Force Chief General Curtis Lemay has been busy getting a proposal ready for the president. He wants to launch a massive air strike the next morning, Sunday, followed by an immediate invasion of Cuba with ground troops to finish the job. The strategic air command is ready to fight a nuclear war at a moment's notice. They keep nuclear armed B-52 bombers in the air every minute of every day, just in case. And naval forces are already surrounding Cuba. Cubans can see this massive naval build up right beyond their national waters, and they know that any moment the U.S. is getting ready to invade. They can see their own ships patrolling Havana Harbor and others. They can see Soviet ships as well, and they can even see some U.S. ships just beyond Cuba's national waters, and international waters about three miles out. The American invading troops are all on landing craft. There's an entire U.S. invading force that is ready to land on the beaches of Northern Cuba. Here's Michael Dobbs, who wrote one minute to midnight. And it's similar in scale to the detailed landings during the Second World War, that there are 120,000 troops, eight divisions, the best men from the 82nd and 101st Airborne divisions, ready to capture airports in the Havana area, and also land on the beaches. What the Americans don't realize is that the Cubans, or rather their Soviet patrons, have tactical nuclear weapons targeted on those beaches. So if the Americans had landed, they would have been properly wiped out by a tactical nuclear weapon, which would have killed thousands and thousands of Americans on the spot as soon as they landed on those beaches. So it wouldn't have been like the D-Day landings at all. It would have been something much more grim and devastating. Robert McNamara, the American Defense Secretary, joins the Pentagon meeting at 1.30 pm. Soon after, the chief of the Joint Reconnaissance Group walks in with some bad news. A U2 has strayed over Soviet territory in the Arctic. This is Maltzby's U2, the one taking air samples at the North Pole. McNamara is tired. He's been eating and sleeping in his office for several days, and only been home once for dinner. He was known for his extraordinary emotional control, but at that moment he shouts across the table, this means war with the Soviet Union. For Khrushchev, a reconnaissance mission crossing into the Soviet Union at this stage could be seen as the final prelude to an American attack, a last-minute preparation before nuclear war. There is only to a certain degree that this guy is at the top half-control over what is happening on the ground. At the moment of the most tense relations, this guy loses his way and flies over Chukotka, and so by certain point, the developments on the ground, the crisis acquired an agency of its own. It was moving to its own drum bit. President Kennedy's response to the news is curt. There's always some son of a bitch who doesn't get the word. Out in the Sargaso Sea, north east of Cuba, four nuclear-armed Soviet submarines are being tracked by the U.S. Navy in the area of the blockade line. In command of all four submarines is Captain Vasiliy Arhipov. He is a board one of them named B-59. A year earlier, he was deputy commander of a nuclear submarine when it's reactor exploded, killing many of the crew. Vasiliy Arhipov, he is very young. He is 36 years old. He was on that submarine, so he faced a situation of a nuclear fire, and he showed himself to be very cold, blooded. In fact, he did not panic at all. This is Svetlana Savoranskaya, director of the Russian programs at the National Security Archive in Washington, D.C. And that's how other people described him is that he was professional, cold, reasonable, and very brave. Arhipov's B-59 is armed with torpedoes. One of them is stripped with a nuclear warhead, which is two-thirds of the power of the Hiroshima bomb. He has questioned his superiors on when it should be used. He has not been given an answer. Also on board is Captain Valentin Savitsky. They are of equal rank. After Kennedy announces the quarantine, the Soviets, after some discussion, decide to stop the boats and not make them go through the quarantine line. Therefore, they're supposed to patrol in the Sargasasi until further orders. And this is where the US anti-submarine warfare forces start following them, trying to surface them. Back in 2001, Svetlana began interviewing all of the surviving captains of the four submarines. They were different accounts of what happened on board the B-59 that day. Over the years, she managed to piece together a story, which she says had been a deeply held secret. They're trying to evade the pursuit by the US forces, so they go up, they go down, they try to recharge the batteries, they use salt water for washing, for personal showers. So people on the boat are in really stressful conditions. The temperature throughout the boat is 40 Celsius. And in the engine room, it went up to 60 Celsius. So people are fainting like flies. On the surface, the USS Coney is one of the American naval ships that have detected the submarines. It's chasing the B-59. In the late afternoon, the Coney drops dummy depth charges to try to get the B-59 to surface and identify itself to the US Navy. Savitsky, the commander of B-59, never had an experience of hearing anti-submarine forces use depth charges. And if you did not have that experience, then you could not distinguish the depth charges from real grenades underwater grenades. It is very, very loud. It's like sitting in a metal barrel when somebody bangs on that barrel. So this is the diary of Captain Third Rank Anatoliy Andreev. He was on B-59. He describes Savitsky. The commander's nerves are shot to hell. He's yelling at everyone and torturing himself. He's already becoming paranoid, scared of his own shadow. The conditions on the submarine put huge pressure on the sweltering crew. This will continue for almost four hours. In Washington, D.C., good news comes in about Maltzby's U2, lost in Soviet airspace, that has caused so much alarm. Soviet fighter jets have attempted to intercept his plane, but Maltzby has managed to avoid them. Moments after slipping the pursuers, with only 12 minutes of fuel left, he closed down the engines and glided for more than an hour toward America's Arctic, slowly descending from an altitude of nearly 14 miles. He found his way to a frozen air strip and deployed a parachute to slow his fuselage like a drag racer. He is shaken, but safe and sound on icy American soil. Then, at 4.50 pm, more news comes in. Rudolph Anderson's U2, taking photos over Cuba, has not reported in. An hour later, the Americans learn why. He's been shot down by a Soviet missile over Cuba. My father, Robert Kennedy, asks whether the pilot has been killed. General Maxwell Taylor replies with a grim explanation. The pilot's body is in the plane. The Soviets recover the photo of Anderson's wife, Jane, from the breast pocket of his flight suit. And months later, it is returned. President Kennedy is worried. He asks the group almost rhetorically. This is much more of an escalation by them, isn't it? McNamara replies, I do not know how to interpret it. And this is a crucial moment because someone in the XCOM meeting, the voice is not entirely clear who it was, says they fired the first shot. Meaning maybe the Soviets have decided to move towards force to defend their position. Maybe this is the beginning of a war. Well, this is a crisis because if the Russians and the Cubans are shooting down American planes, we really are in the edge of war. And the war hawks, the joint chiefs, start pushing for an immediate invasion. They want to bomb the missiles, a surgical strike, or an actual invasion of Cuba. And the pressure is on the President to do that. My father would later write in his memoir, 13 Days. There was the feeling that the news was tightening on all of us, on Americans, on mankind, and that the bridges to escape were crumbling. Kennedy makes a crucial decision. There had been a contingency plan that if a YouTube was shot down over Cuba, the response would be to attack the base in Cuba that fired the Sam surface-to-air missile that downed the YouTube. But Kennedy rejects this because he says the situation is too sensitive. And so the US does not immediately retaliate. General Taylor proposes immediate escalation. He wants to attack the missile site that shot down the YouTube plane, followed by a general strike if necessary. But it's too late in the day. It's already getting dark in Cuba. Everyone is pulling in different directions, exhausted, and irritable. Here's Fred Logueval, who wrote the biography of President Kennedy. Should the United States respond by attacking a Sam site, surface-to-air missile site, which was responsible for shooting down the plane, don't we have to demonstrate our resolve in some way by hitting back? Kennedy resists. So in some ways, increasingly isolated, he is determined by this point to convince the Kremlin that he is sincere, that a trade, the Soviet missiles in Cuba, for the American missiles in Turkey, we're going to have that trade. It is showing this capacity for empathetic understanding on the part of John F. Kennedy. He can put himself, and he says this to his advisors. We need to try to see this from Khrushchev's perspective. There comes a point in this crisis when it feels as if, in spite of the difficulty in communication, President Kennedy and Premier Khrushchev are aligned more closely to each other than with the people around them. When Nina and I met, one of the things we wanted to talk about was whether the two men felt an actual personal connection after their summit meeting in Vienna. We both hit on a seemingly minor comment, the poignant moment when Nikita Khrushchev realizes that his son, Leonid, who had been killed in the Second World War, would now be the same age as John F. Kennedy. It makes me think back to Vienna, and how everyone says that that was such a disaster, but it did give them a chance to meet personally. I think that President Kennedy left an impression on Khrushchev, which was really important, which was that he was a veteran. He was the same age as Khrushchev's son, and he was in a position that Khrushchev's son might have occupied in Russia, if he had survived. And I think, is it possible that that stayed with him? And he began to think of President Kennedy in much more friendly terms, even though they were in conflict with each other. He began to see the pressures that President Kennedy was under, and the fact that both of them were really seeking peace. Yes, Max. Many people, including Pierre Salinger, Kennedy's press secretary said, no, that's was the moment. Actually, he was the first one. I heard it from. That was the moment when they understood that they have something common. In that, Khrushchev was looking at President Kennedy and thinking, my son would have been like, could have been like that. And he's dead, and so he was looking at this young man, thinking, this guy was lucky to be alive, and my son died. So it was a connection, not just the war, but also what Kennedy represented that Leonid could have. That's such an astonishingly poignant moment, a father looking at someone who was his son's age, and he probably had so many hopes and wishes for his own son, and saw that in President Kennedy. And it was also interesting that that was the president of a country that is an adversary. So I thought it was a moment that was important. I mean, they had at least a glimpse of the humanity in each other. And I've got to think that some part of that came back to both men, and they probably both thought, this is, we can work this out. After hours of trying to avoid depths, charges, conditions on the B-59 submarine in the Sargaso Sea are becoming unbearable. The sub has to come to the surface, to start its diesel engines and recharge its batteries. The conning tower, a raised platform, is the first part of the submarine above the water. Savitsky, then Archipa, and the signaling officer come up first. But the signaling officer gets his equipment caught in the staircase. What they see as they come up for air is a shock. They've been sitting below the surface with almost no electricity, almost in the dark. When the submarine surfaces, Savitsky, who is the first person on the conning tower, looks around and he sees a group of American destroyers and aircraft carrier music is playing on one of the destroyers. To them, it feels at the same time chaotic and very aggressive. He sees the planes overflying the submarine very, very low. The helicopters and the planes are trying to take pictures of the submarine. And this is one of the reasons that they're pointing these very, very bright lights on the conning tower. So looking at that and not having information for the last almost two days, Savitsky thinks they're under attack. Savitsky Panics, he tries to descend from the bridge back below. He wants to give the order to fire the nuclear torpedo. So he immediately turns around and runs down to the staircase. So he tries to get down and he yells down. Urgent dive, arm, torpedo number one. He can't get down immediately because the signaling officer is still trying to come up. Meanwhile, Arhipov is standing on the conning tower, looking around and trying to figure out if the war has already started, if they're under attack. Arhipov notices a flashing light coming from the USS Coney. Gary Slaughter, on board the Coney, is signaling an apology to the Soviets for the aggressive behavior of one of the overhead planes. The Americans are not attacking them. And he turns to Savitsky and he calms him down. He says, we're not under attack. They're trying to communicate with us. It comes down to chance and split second decisions. If the Soviet captains had fired, political shockwaves would have meant U.S. retaliation against the Soviet Union. The Americans won't be aware of this near miss for almost 40 years. As day turns into night in Washington, nerves are fraying in the White House. People are losing focus. They're going around in circles. In the Rome, when the XCOM is meeting, there are 15-20 people. They're very powerful people. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Maxwell Taylor, a brilliant general that the Kennedys were very fond of, but he's representing a group of generals who want to attack. This is Evan Thomas. You have a very quiet, subdued secretary of state, Dean Rusk, who doesn't say much of anything. You have a very brainy, a secretary of defense, Robert McNamara, but he's pulled in about 10 different directions, not sleeping, and he becomes towards the end of this process a little bit in coherent. You have a hawkish head of the CIA. You have all these powerful people pulling in different directions. My father, Robert Kennedy, recalls that there were sharp disagreements in the group by this stage. They've lived through 12 intensely stressful days and often sleepless nights. Rival factions draft different responses to Khrushchev. Some in the cabinet room want to ignore the issue of the Turkey missiles. They think that if the United States offers to negotiate, Khrushchev will demand an endless list of concessions. In one corner, they're writing an ultimatum, which says, dismantle the bases by 5 p.m. Washington time on Monday or face the consequences. In another, the head of the CIA wants to tell the Soviets, attack our surveillance planes again and we will destroy all your military bases on Cuba. It becomes my father's job to push everyone into moving forward quickly. And they're listening to him because one, he represents his brother, the president. But two, because he's a force in himself. He's at once kind of an annoying presence, a goat, he pesters them, he teases them, he badgers them. And at the same time, he's a voice of calm and reason and prematurely wise. During the course of this crisis, one of Bobby Kennedy's aids came to him and asked him what was up and how he was feeling. And Bobby said, I'm older, he was aging during this crisis. It put years on his life these 13 days. More and more conversations begin to happen outside the cabinet room, away from the tension in XCOM. At 7.30 p.m., President Kennedy makes his position clear, why would this committee want to do something as dangerous as invading when the United States can safely trade away the Soviet missiles in Cuba for the obsolete Jupiter missiles in Turkey? My father and Ted Sorenson draw up a letter which incorporates several of the rival proposals. In it, they call for work on the Cuba missile sites to cease and request that the weapons be made inoperable. Then the United States will lift the naval quarantine and there will be no attack on Cuba. This letter makes no mention of the missile swap. The president approves it because he is another plan for Robert Kennedy to negotiate that swap in secret. Next time on the bomb, time is running out. Kruschev needs to agree to withdraw the missiles. My brother is under intense pressure to invade Cuba. This has been Episode 9 of 10 of the bomb, Season 3, Kennedy and Kruschev, from the BBC World Service, presented by me Nina Kruscheva. And me, Max Kennedy. The two previous seasons of the bomb are also available to listen to right now. The producer is Megan Jones, the editor is Chris Ledjard. The production coordinator is Stuart Laws, researched by many Harapin, Isabel Eaton. The story editor is Kate Lee's. Music composed by Elizabeth Pernell. The theme is by Trevor Gerekis. Sound designed by Tim Nielsen at Skywalker Sound. The sound supervisor is Catherine Robinson. The commissioning editor is Simon Pitts. The bomb, Kennedy and Kruschev is a BBC audio whales production for the BBC World Service. Music 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 Wersley on BBC.com It all starts with a subscription to BBC.com. Find out more at BBC.com-unlimited.