Reexamining the Cuban Missile Crisis Six Decades Later

Serhii Plokhy, Nuclear Folly: A History of the Cuban Missile Crisis. New York: W. W.

Norton, 2021. 480 pp. $35.00 cloth, $22.00 paper.When reviewing Michael Dobbs's “One Minute to Midnight” in 2008, the late diplomat Richard Holbrooke began, “Any new entry in the crowded field of books on the 1962 Cuban missile crisis must pass an immediate test: Is it just another recapitulation, or does it increase our net understanding of this seminal cold war event?”2Dobbs's book drew extensively on formerly classified Soviet sources—only the second major narrative account of the crisis to do so—and Holbrooke's verdict was that it passed the test “with flying colors.”3 Does Serhii Plokhy's Nuclear Folly: A New History of the Cuban Missile Crisis, published on the eve of the 60th anniversary of the crisis, also pass? Well, it certainly has some original aspects.

In contrast to prior works, which presumed that readers grasped the event's iconic importance for the Cold War, the nuclear arms race, U.S. foreign policy, and public perceptions of John F. Kennedy's presidency, Plokhy explicitly addresses younger readers when he cites the nuclear tensions that arose with North Korea, Russia, and Iran during Donald Trump's presidency (pp. xiii-xiv, 361–363) to justify learning about a prior generation's brush with the apocalypse.As for new sources, Plokhy relies on numerous Soviet and Russian-language sources—as he did for his fine books on the 1945 Yalta conference and the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, and as did the earlier missile crisis studies by Timothy Naftali and Aleksandr Fursenko and by Dobbs—but his only original archival discovery was a selection of documents on Operation ANADYR (the Soviet military operation in 1962 to deploy nuclear missiles to Cuba in great secrecy) from the archive of the Ukrainian Security Service in Kyiv, which houses the records of the former Ukrainian branch of the Soviet State Security Committee (KGB). These materials add a few piquant details on the transport of the missiles and the perspectives of those involved, but they do not change the basic story line.

Plokhy also cites recently published Russian sources, mostly interviews, recollections, and documents available on-line, to liven his claims about how close a Soviet submarine inside the “quarantine” line may have come to firing a nuclear torpedo at U.S. ships (in the mistaken belief that war had already broken out)—a story that has received extensive attention from other scholars over the past fifteen years but still suffers from a dearth of contemporaneous documentation.As the title of Nuclear Folly suggests, and as Plokhy states explicitly at the outset (p. xvi), he wants readers to focus not on the things that both U.S. and Soviet policymakers got right, but on what they got wrong—and, implicitly, to fault them and the Cold War nuclear psychosis more broadly for bringing humanity to the brink of destruction for the sake of issues (in this case Cuba) that were neither an existential threat nor even a genuine vital national security concern to either side.On the whole, then, Nuclear Folly merits a passing grade for Holbrooke's test—but only perhaps what to a to a or book in of Soviet and and a to a new of to just a about this it does not come with new or that or our of the to Plokhy's of the or by both and that the to on the of in to from more and and at the outset of the In the of Plokhy his the book to a over but he certainly have or of the in Plokhy to both and during the of U.S. nuclear and Cuba from another of Plokhy foreign the book also the of the over had late that the and military from the had but had not in late an on the he had at in and the had in to the of from the a few the missile crisis, in a on to that he to the on the U.S. in Plokhy (pp. U.S. policymakers of and that a U.S. of Cuba a Soviet of or that the by Cuba on the “quarantine” Cuba the missiles were the Soviet to in a by to and and he the to an of for a new of a in to an missile crisis that Plokhy, the Kennedy's on to from some and Soviet in F. that he by on or at that a a in have the crisis, or in this not only but of Kennedy's to a with to as the crisis Plokhy (p. that on Kennedy's Committee the of a to the U.S. in to to which it to in In the that he got of the Soviet Cuba the by the the that this the of Plokhy were to and was by the on both U.S. State in the to the U.S. in and to the was U.S. it in a to to an of the of Cold War may this as it in a in the in from the to Nuclear of this the of how Plokhy the in book also by numerous they at a when Nuclear Folly a to the on the missile the of a new to the case of a nuclear crisis in which both and the to the brink of a to over the of a North or was a to were and to Serhii Plokhy's our years of on the Cuban missile crisis and the of new Soviet sources, but In this not a book to our new add new details but to the of the crisis, and Plokhy's some of the crisis, from John F.

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