Kennedy and Khrushchev: 8. The logic of war

title: Kennedy and Khrushchev: 8. The logic of war
author: The Bomb
contenttype: podcast
publication: The Bomb
published: 2026-01-19T01:30:00
sourceurl: http://open.live.bbc.co.uk/mediaselector/6/redir/version/2.0/mediaset/audio-nondrm-download-rss/proto/http/vpid/p0msw4bd.mp3

word_count: 5300

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. The best B2B marketing gets wasted on the wrong people, so when you want to reach the right professionals, use LinkedIn ads. LinkedIn has grown to a network of over one billion professionals, including 130 million decision makers, and that's where it stands apart from other ad buys. You can target your buyers by job title, industry, company, role, seniority, skills, company revenue, so you can stop wasting budget on the wrong audience. It's why LinkedIn ads generate the highest B2B return on ad spend of major ad networks. Spend $250 on your first campaign on LinkedIn ads and get $250 credit for the next one. Just go to LinkedIn.com slash broadcast. That's LinkedIn.com slash broadcast. Terms and conditions apply. Toyota has the perfect vehicle for any adventure. All the Toyota new ones include ToyotaCare, a free maintenance plan for two years, an exclusive guarantee for the hybrid battery and the quality and reliability of Toyota. Prove one already in your local Toyota concessionary. There you will be prepared to go where you want this environment. Toyota, let's go together. Consult your local Toyota concessionary for more information about the guarantee of the hybrid battery. The National Press Club, Washington. In a smoky wood paneled room, journalists hang out at the Long Bar. In 1962, it's a go-to place for cheap drinks, food, and gossip. Amongst the journalists at Russian spies, listening in to conversations and picking up what useful information they can, something, anything to pass on to their superiors. It's Wednesday night, October 24th. Day 9 of the Cuban Missile Crisis. A KGB agent working undercover as a foreign correspondent chats to the barman, Johnny Prokhov. Prokhov whispers something to the agent. He's just overheard a conversation between two reporters from the New York Herald Tribune. One of them has been selected to travel with the US Marines if they invade Cuba and write an article about the operation. Prokhov tells the agent that he heard the reporter say, it looks like I'm going. That information gets passed to the Soviet ambassador, Anatoliy Dobrinin, who urgently telegrams Moscow. The gossip becomes top secret intelligence information and reaches Nikita Khrushchev's desk. For the Soviet premiere, it's one of several signs that the United States is on the verge of invading Cuba. From the BBC World Service, this is the bomb. Season 3, Kennedy and Khrushchev. With me, Nina Khrushchev. And me, Max Kennedy. Episode 8, The Logic of War. Soviet raider follows American nuclear arm bombers as they carry out military exercises. Since the US blockade of Soviet ships heading towards Cuba came into force, they have been making the same maneuvers again and again. The jets fly eastwards over Europe towards the borders of the Soviet block and then take a sudden turn away over the Adriatic Sea. It seems that the Americans are preparing to attack Moscow as well as Cuba. Premiere Khrushchev is deeply alarmed by the escalation over the past 24 hours. He wants to signal a retreat. His colleagues are used to emotional outbursts from him, but that's not what they get this time. The Americans say that the Soviet installations in Cuba must be dismantled, he tells them. Perhaps that should be done. It's not capitulation on our part, he insists. If we shoot, they'll shoot back. Here is Sergei Plohi, the author of Nuclear Folly. The confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union. If such confrontation would start, it would be very difficult to keep it in terms of the conventional warfare. It most likely would go nuclear. One thing that Kennedy and Khrushchev shared, that was fear, fear of the not just nuclear weapons, but more specifically the hydrogen bomb. That was the game changer. That put the world on the brink of real destruction. The Alexanderovsk, the Soviet ship with nuclear warheads packed into its hold, sits in harboring Cuba. As it waits for unloading, Khrushchev presents his argument to the Presidium. He wants to offer Kennedy a deal. If the Americans will guarantee not to attack Cuba, Khrushchev will take out his missiles. The Presidium approves, in fact, they're relieved. It is a correct and reasonable tactic, according to the notes taken at the meeting. Do not unload the warheads of the Alexanderovsk. Khrushchev instructs General Cleve in Cuba. Turn the ship around for transportation back to the Soviet Union. On the ground in Cuba, the intense roar of low-level American reconnaissance flights fills the air, unsettling everyone. The planes come over twice a day. So that, of course, infuriated us, I mean, it was like saying, you see, we can do whatever we want, you have to accept it. Carlos Alzúgará was 18 years old in 1962 and working at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Havana. He was also in a reserve military unit. Yes, I saw, I saw during my digging trenches in the outskirts of Havana, American fighter jets would come roaring and, of course, we were very incensed by that. Soviet generals report that American planes are flying so low over their heads that they can see the pilot's faces. The soldiers on the ground make rude gestures at the aircraft. These low-level jets are able to get much more detailed pictures of the Soviet missile sites than the U-2 spy planes, which fly so high that the pilots can see the curvature of the Earth. This is Michael Dobbs, the author of One Minute to Midnight. They're much more visible to the Russians and the Cubans than the U-2 flights have been. The Cubans haven't been aware of the U-2 flights, but they can see these U.S. Navy planes just a few hundred feet above their heads. And, of course, that is an insult to the Cubans who feel this is a deliberate infringement on their sovereignty and possibly a precursor of actual bombing raids in the days ahead. The morning after President Kennedy's speech revealing to the world the Cuba had become a base for Soviet nuclear missiles. Havana wakes up to news headlines, saying the island is now on a war footing. In a long television interview, the Cuban leader Fidel Castro ridicules what President Kennedy has said in his speech about his concern for the well-being of Cubans. And he claims the missiles on the island are purely defensive. Carlos El Zugarai. Fidel Castro spoke to the nation. He said, if there is an invasion, we will expel them. If there is something worse, we would resist. And then he said at the end of the speech, now what is important is that everyone reports immediately to their military units and get ready to have the fight. Castro has already mobilized 300,000 Cuban soldiers to fight off the American invasion of Cuba. And we were ready. I mean, we were ready to fight it out. We had the will to resist. Like John F. Kennedy, Nikita Khrushchev carries the scars of the Second World War. My great-grandfather witnessed the battle of Kiev and Harkiv in Ukraine and helped to blend the defense of Stalingrad in 1943, a turning point in the war against the Nazis. He was a commissar, an intermediary for Stalin, who used Khrushchev to keep his military commanders under control. Khrushchev, who spent a lot of time on the front line, would plead with Stalin on their behalf. More than one million Soviets died at Stalingrad. It's one of the deadliest battles in the history of war. Khrushchev does not want to start another one. Nina, one of the most striking things to me is your great-grandfather's role in World War II and at Stalingrad. The time that I've spent with veterans of World War II on our side, that war shaped their life, their world view, how they behave at home with their family, really intensely. Can we talk about how the war and the fighting, especially around Stalingrad, affected Khrushchev? The war shaped him. I think the war was very important because that's when he started turning away from Stalin. He was a very devoted Stalin, a parachic, Stalin knew that anything that he needs to do, Khrushchev will do because he was a doer. But then during the war, he saw what a horrible preparation the Soviet Union had for the war, how many people died, how badly it was organized, and there in Stalingrad, he was in charge. I even have pictures of this with Zhukov, they're looking at the maps, and so that shaped him a tremendous amount. I think he got, when the war ended, he got out of it with much less belief in Stalin and much more believe in the people. I mean, I saw it sounds cliché, but it is true. He was in charge of defending Ukraine. He was in charge of building Ukraine back from the ashes, and he traveled around Ukraine. My aunt Radha went with him, and she said it was absolutely hard breaking, and he would go into those villages, and people were boiling dogs, and it was just a horrible, horrible thing, and he would cry with them and promise them the greatest future. So Stalin was no longer hero of this post-war development. But there are events that stand out for me that I would think would have to cause, what today we call post-traumatic stress, seeing starvation, seeing the almost total destruction of the land, and then having to administer a response that has so many soldiers dying, and just, you know, train load after train load going in, I can't imagine what that would be like. But I think they all went through this, and I wonder if when you go through this, there were any war general. I mean, you kind of separate your existence from what you've seen. I'd imagine. But yes, I think that in some ways, the atonement of 1956, with the secret speech, then the denunciation of Stalin was probably, I never thought of it as a post-traumatic stress disorder, but probably it is something like that, because it was a giant atonement, and that atonement was so giant that must have been brought on by something giant that happened before. It's not just the war, I also think that the purges of which Khrushchev participated in and wrote those orders to prosecute, especially when he was in Ukraine. That's what you really thought, because I never thought of it as a payment for death. Interesting. Wow. The whole world was becoming more and more alarmed. That's my father, Robert Kennedy's recollection, in his memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis, 13 Days. At this stage, the Americans and the Soviets are managing the crisis mostly behind closed doors, but a confrontation at the United Nations Security Council is played out in full public view. On Thursday, October 25th, there is a public confrontation of the United Nations between Kennedy's ambassador, Adelaide Eastevenson, and the Soviet ambassador, Florian Zorin. James Hirschberg of George Washington University. This really does become memorable to millions of Americans and others around the world, who were afraid that World War III might break out at any moment. The Soviet ambassador, Valerian Zorin, claims that the Americans have nothing but so-called false evidence to prove the presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba. They were making the case that it was all propaganda, that it was an American deception scheme. But US ambassador, Adelaide Stevenson, fights back. I want to say to you, Mr. Zorin, that I don't have your talent for obfuscation, for confusing language and for double talk, and I must confess to you that I'm glad I don't. But if I understood what you said, you said that my position had changed, that today I was defensive, because we didn't have the evidence to prove our assertions that your government had installed long-range missiles in Cuba. Well, let me say something to you, Mr. Ambassador, we do have the evidence. We have it, and it's clear and incontrovertible. Stevenson is able to not only accuse the Soviets, but to reveal intelligence photographs taken by the YouTube plans of the missile sites. And Zorin refuses to be brow-beaten and says, I will not be treated like a prosecutor, treats a witness in an American courtroom, you will get your answer in good time. All right, sir. Let me ask you one simple question. Do you, Ambassador Zorin, deny that the USSR has placed and is placing medium and intermediate range missiles and sites in Cuba? Yes or no? Don't wait for the translation. Yes or no? Ambassador Zorin is genuinely unaware of the weapons masked in Cuba. He has been kept in the dark. I am not in an American courtroom, sir, and therefore I do not wish to answer a question that is put to me in the fashion in which prosecutor does. So when you please continue your statement, you will have your answer and you cause. I'm prepared to wait for my answer until hell freezes over if that's your decision. And I'm also prepared to present the evidence in this room. American aides in dark suits carry in poster-sized photographs of the missile sites under construction. These are placed in easels just below the gigantic mural for peace at the center of the auditorium in the crowded UN Security Council chamber. Everyone has heard about America's reconnaissance technology, but the public has never before seen the photographs. The CIA declassifies these images for this specific confrontation. In an age where communications between governments are painfully slow, live television cameras reveal Soviet deceit to the world in real time. President Kennedy is watching in the White House. Terrific, he says. I never knew Adley had it in him. It's front page news in the New York Times the following day and a major public relations defeat for the Soviets. Around the world, the showdown causes shockwaves. Premier Khrushchev is not aware of the United Nations bus stop, but he knows he needs to act. He begins dictating a letter to Kennedy. His stenographer takes it down. He talks about the need for peace. War is a calamity, he says. Not a game. If indeed war should break out, he writes. Then it would not be in our power to stop it. For such is the logic of war. I have participated in two wars and know that war ends when it is rolled through cities and villages. Everywhere is sowing death and destruction. The letter is long and secluded. It is also emotional. Khrushchev comes to his proposal. We will declare that our ships bound for Cuba will not carry any kind of armaments. You would declare the United States will not invade Cuba. But he doesn't mention removing the missiles on the island. He gives a vague promise to remove military specialists. And then comes a heartfelt section. He tells Kennedy, you are threatening us with war. We and you ought not now to pull on the ends of the rope in which you have tied the knot of war. A moment may come when that knot will be tied so tight that even he who tied it will not have the strength to untie it. And then it will be necessary to cut that knot. You understand perfectly of what terrible forces our countries dispose. Max and I looked at the letter together. Okay, so in Russian it is so we should not be pulling the other side of this knot. He says to Kennedy that you tied that knot. He blames the knot. He blames the knot. He blames the knot. He says he is a new tie. You tied the knot. Right. Well, I think it's when it's translated into English. It sounds unusual. But when you read it in Russian, Russian is very metaphorical language. For Khrushchev, the letters were very much in Khrushchev's style, very verbose because Russian language generally is verbose. But also Khrushchev was verbose. I think that my father and president Kennedy, I think they made a great effort to be as clear as possible in their letters. My father was almost wrote as a legal scholar and saw the documents as binding. And so he spent a lot of time editing and changing little words. He is shell or master may and really looking at how someone else might interpret it. And then they would get these very long letters. For Khrushchev, he also had to keep a face of we didn't screw up with the Cuban missile crisis. We didn't create a crisis. And so we're actually going to pretend that it's all going according to plan, which probably president Kennedy didn't have to because in the Soviet Union, nobody even knew about this except for those people in the Kremlin. There is a mixture of not wanting to show weakness, asking for common sense, promising future relationship. And I think when you read it, if you're not used to this kind of language or this kind of narratives, that becomes incredibly confusing. What exactly are you asking for? What exactly do you want? The Finnish letter is nearly 3,000 words long and is finally delivered to the US Embassy in Moscow at 4.43 pm local time. It will take another 12 hours for it to get to Washington. Every day, Stanford Medicine advances human health, turning scientific discoveries into newfound and breakthrough innovations into personal triumphs. 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 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. It is still Friday morning in Washington. President Kennedy does not want to put Khrushchev in a corner from which the Soviet premier cannot escape, but the president needs to demonstrate to the public, to the press, and to his impatient military chiefs that he is keeping up the pressure on the Soviets. Soon after dawn, American naval officers stop a tanker heading to Cuba, the Marucola, a Lebanese ship under charter to the Soviet Union. They will board her and search for military supplies. It is the first time the naval blockade of Cuba has been enforced. The interception is made by the USS Joseph P. Kennedy, named after the president's brother, My Uncle Joe, a bomber pilot who was killed during the Second World War. The captain gives his American crew clear instructions. Be careful to use friendly gestures, avoid confrontation. Shortly after dawn, the USS Kennedy signals to the Marucola using a flashing light. Prepare for inspection is the message. The Greek sailors onboard the Marucola offer the Americans coffee and let them search the ship. After two hours, the US Navy can't find anything that resembles missile parts. The Marucola is cleared to proceed to Havana. News of the incident is released and the press and people around the world who are desperate for information on the unfolding crisis at last have an update and something to talk about. By Friday, Fidel Castro is in a state of high anxiety. Cuban intelligence agents are telling him that the Kennedy administration has prepared an ultimatum for the UN Secretary General to issue. It calls for the missiles to be removed from Cuba. Castro orders Cuban forces to move to their command posts and prepare for hostilities. He's enraged by the constant overflights. They are violation of his airspace. In the rising tension, he commands anti-aircraft batteries to shoot down American planes that fly over his island, starting the following day. Castro is getting frantic. He's getting reports from Brazilian envoys saying possibly an innovation within 24 to 48 hours. This is Professor Renata Keller, author of the fate of the Americas, the Cuban missile crisis, and the hemispheric Cold War. He sees the clock ticking and he's tired of these overflights that are collecting more information and Cuban weapons can reach the low-level flights. They can't reach the U-2s, but he tells his soldiers to open fire the next day, and he meets with the Soviet ambassador and kind of interrogates the Soviet ambassador about what's going on as the United Nations and why hadn't the Soviet representative at the United Nations had a better job of standing up for Cuban's right to defend itself. He convinces the Soviets to turn on their radar. He tells them we are going to start opening fire on U-s airplanes. You should do the same thing. Carlos Alzogarai, a young diplomat also serving in a reserve battalion in 1962, remembers spending the day digging trenches. The Cuban strategy was to fight it in the beaches from the beginning, resist an invasion attempt, and that's why we had to dig a lot of trenches in the coast to try to make the invasion as costly as possible for the American Armed Forces. Of course, we knew very well because that was the way that the United States carried out boards that they would bomb us first for several days, but that was part of the thing. We had to begin, be ready, try to save ourselves so that when they landed, they would have resistance. Fidel Castro spends the afternoon with a head of Soviet forces in Cuba, General Issa Pliyev, and Pliyev too begins to think that war is unavoidable. With rumors spreading of an American attack, Pliyev orders for some of the nuclear warheads to come out of storage in the mountains of Behokal, and he sends coded messages to his commanders to be prepared for military action. Some interpret the messages meaning war a dawn tomorrow. In Havana, at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Carlos Alzogarai is asked to write a report describing what an atomic bomb could do to the city. Well, I described it. I said, well, we are going to hear an explosion, but most of all, we will see a flash of light, a large flash of light, then we will feed a lot of heat, and then we will die. I mean, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs is a glass building. The exterior walls are glass, so everyone would have been killed immediately, not by the heat, at least by the radiation, or maybe with some glass shrapnel. So that's what I was doing. I mean, I remember that very, very distinctively. It was a key moment in my life. I was born a few years after the Cuban Missile Crisis, but my older sister, Kathleen remembers. I asked her what things were like at home with our parents, Robert and Ethel Kennedy, in October 1962. We were accustomed to thinking about nuclear war a lot, and we had a large house, and we had a big basement, and we easily could have built a shelter. But Daddy said he didn't want to build a shelter, because he never wanted to be in a position where he would be closing the door on somebody who wanted to get into our shelter. So we never had a fallout shelter in our house. Kathleen, can you tell us about some of your recollections of the crisis? You didn't really see Daddy very much. I mean, he used to come when he was at 20, generally he'd come home often for dinner, but not during that period of time. Except for one night, one evening, he did come home, and we had a practice of saying prayers every night before bed. We would say nighttime prayers. And as we said at the Rosary, Daddy explained to us that there is a threat of nuclear war, because the Russians had put missiles in Cuba, and they might use those missiles, or we might have to protect ourselves. And he said there's a place in Virginia that has been built as a safety place for people to go to, members of the cabinet's family, to go to. So if anybody wants to go to that place and feel that they're safe, you can go now. I want you to know you have that choice. And we discussed it. Not for very long, because we all said, no, we want to be here with you, Daddy. And Mummy obviously said the same thing. I want to be with you, Bobby. And so we had just said our prayers, and he kissed us all, and hugged us, and then went back to the White House. But it was all clear. That's what we wanted to do. President Kennedy has ordered an increase in crusader flights over Cuba. They are turning up new and alarming evidence. The work on missile launchpads in Cuba, instead of stopping, has accelerated, and the CIA finds for the first time short-range tactical Luna missiles for use on the battlefield, though they cannot confirm whether the nuclear warheads for these rockets are already on the island. An invasion would be extremely dangerous. As John McCone says to the president after they have looked at the new photographs, it's very evil stuff they've got there. But that evening in Washington, teletype machines start to print something out just after 6 p.m. It's a long letter, forwarded from the US Embassy in Moscow. Jim Hirschberg. Communications were so primitive that it had to be sent in several parts. Each part of it had to be encoded, sent to the Soviet Embassy in Washington, decoded, translated into English, and it doesn't really reach Kennedy until Friday evening. Communications are slow, dangerously slow, in 1962. Phone links between some countries are immediate. Others take hours to connect. Khrushchev's critical message has been transmitted over a telegraph cable laid across the Atlantic floor more than a century earlier. It arrives in four separate chunks in the wrong order. The full letter from Khrushchev to President Kennedy at the height of a crisis and dangering the entire world took more than three hours to print out. President Kennedy's advisors finally received the last portion of the letter at 9.15 p.m. Once they have sorted it out, they begin to digest its contents. It seems to reveal, you know, Khrushchev's personal sunlight because it talks about his experience in World War II and he has phrases like the smell of burning is in the air. Kennedy actually judges things by their literary qualities sometimes. It's very impressed by the letter and it seems to him that Khrushchev is communicating that he shares Kennedy's abhorrence of the idea of a gigantic catacrysmic apocalyptic thermonuclear war. And this really helps the two leaders begin to reach a common language. President Kennedy and his advisors notice Khrushchev's shift of tone. Robert Kennedy writes in his memoir 13 days, I had a slight feeling of optimism as I drove home from the State Department that night. The letter with all its rhetoric had the beginnings, perhaps, of some accommodation, some agreement. It's night time in Havana. Fidel Castro visits the Soviet ambassador to Cuba, Alexander Alexei. Castro is convinced that the Americans are coming and he wants Khrushchev to act. The night of the 26th, Castro is wondering, did I do enough, is shooting at these planes or do we need to take other steps to be ready? And he decides to send a message to Khrushchev to strengthen Khrushchev's resolve. And so at around 3am Castro goes back to the Soviet embassy in Havana and he insists that the Soviet ambassador, Alexei, have come down to the bunker with him, in case the invasion starts. And he composes this message to Khrushchev in which he is trying to warn him you need to be ready and invasion is coming. And if there isn't a attack on Cuba, the next thing is going to be an attack on the Soviet Union. With the ambassador's help, he writes an emotional letter, Alexei translating from Spanish to Russian. As they drink beer and eat sausages, they talk for hours trying to find the right language to appeal to Khrushchev. They come up with the following. The imperialists might initiate a nuclear strike against the USSR as well. In those circumstances, the moment would be right for considering the elimination of such a danger, claiming the lawful right to self-defense. Castro is proposing that Khrushchev strikes first with his nuclear weapons. He says, however difficult and horrifying this decision may be, there is, I believe, no other recourse. Castro and Alexei have spent hours into the night and early morning and they're looking for the right words that would convey that message without Khrushchev. And so he sends this message to Khrushchev. It's later been called a Doomsday letter. He is essentially writing a suicide note on behalf of the entire Cuban people saying, we are ready to sacrifice ourselves for the cause of defeating US imperialism. We need to know that you are ready too. So he's prepared to risk nuclear war to save his regime, right? That's the state of mind, of Castro. So if I die and my regime dies, well, the the world can go to hell as well. And that's certainly not thinking in Moscow. When he gets the message the next day, Khrushchev is shocked. Khrushchev wants to avoid nuclear war at any cost. So despite all this hour spent on finding right words and attempts not to scare, Khrushchev, that's what that telegram really achieves. It also makes Khrushchev disregard whatever Castro is saying what his feelings might be. Next time on the bomb, Kennedy and Khrushchev search desperately for a way out of the crisis. Someone in the XCOM meeting, the voice is not entirely clear who it was, says they fired the first shot. If the Russians and the Cubans are shooting down American planes, we really are in the edge of war. And the war hawks that joint chiefs start pushing for an immediate invasion. He tries to get down and he yells down, urgent dive, arm torpedo number one. This has been Episode 8 of 10 of the bomb, Season 3, Kennedy and Khrushchev from the BBC World Service. 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, that Skywalker sound. The sound supervisor is Catherine Robinson. The commissioning editor is Simon Pitts. The bomb, Kennedy and Khrushchev is a BBC audio whales production for the BBC World Service. 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.