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Reexamining the Cuban Missile Crisis Six Decades Later

2023; The MIT Press; Volume: 25; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1162/jcws_c_01176

1531-3298

James G. Hershberg, Svetlana Savranskaya, Thomas R. Blanton, Don Munton, Serhii Plokhy,

Nuclear Issues and Defense

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 used to be called a “Gentleman's C” (though is now, thanks to grade-flation, often a Gentleman's B or B+). The book is vividly written, provocative in its use of Soviet and (sometimes unreliable) Soviet-bloc sources,4 and a lucid, entertaining tale to entice a new generation of students to read (not just digest a podcast) about this now six-decade-old event—but it does not come up with new interpretations or information that significantly advances or modifies our “net understanding” of the crisis. Contrary to Plokhy's insinuation, serious students of the crisis—unlike hagiographers or propagandists—have long recognized major, potentially fatal, miscalculations by both Nikita Khrushchev and Kennedy that brought the two sides to being “truly on the verge of war” (as Khrushchev put it), in addition to their prudent backpedaling from more dangerous positions and inclinations before and at the outset of the crisis.5 In the understandable interests of readability, Plokhy (or his editors) limited the book to a bit over 400 pages (including footnotes), but he certainly could have delved deeper or examined fresher aspects of the crisis.6Two problems in particular stand out. Plokhy makes considerable effort to explain Khrushchev's decision-making both before and during the crisis. While stressing Khrushchev's motives of countering U.S. nuclear superiority and protecting Cuba from another Bay of Pigs–style invasion (what Plokhy calls Khrushchev's “two foreign policy imperatives,” p. 57), the book also notes the pertinence of the ongoing standoff over Berlin, where Khrushchev had demanded since late 1958 that the United States, Britain, and France withdraw military forces from the city's western side. Tensions had ebbed but had not disappeared after Khrushchev in late 1961 abandoned an ultimatum on the issue he had given Kennedy at their June 1961 summit in Vienna and after the Berlin Wall had gone up in August 1961 to stem the exodus of refugees from the east. Just a few weeks before the missile crisis, in a message on 28 September 1962, Khrushchev openly suggested to Kennedy that he intended to resume the pressure on Berlin after the U.S. congressional midterm elections in November.7As Plokhy notes (pp. 106–108), U.S. policymakers (e.g., Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara and senior intelligence officials) sensed that a U.S. blockade of Cuba might provoke a retaliatory Soviet blockade of West Berlin or mused that Washington might reverse the equation by blockading Cuba if Moscow clamped down on West Berlin. When ordering the “quarantine” around Cuba after the missiles were discovered, Kennedy (and others) fully expected the Soviet Union to counter in Berlin. The president created a White House “Berlin-NATO” task force (headed by Paul H. Nitze) to monitor Berlin intelligence and contingency planning, and he directed the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to undertake an urgent review of plans for a new blockade. Yet high-level fears of a Kremlin response in Berlin turned out to be an important missile crisis “dog that didn't bark.” Plokhy, inexplicably, ignores the main reason why: Khrushchev's crucial decision, after Kennedy's speech on 22 October, to reject suggestions from some advisers (notably, Deputy Foreign Minister Vasilii Kuznetsov and Soviet Ambassador in Washington Anatolii F. Dobrynin) that he hit back by stepping up pressure on West Berlin or at least threatening to.8 Given that a different decision (i.e., a crackdown in Berlin) might have seriously escalated the crisis, Khrushchev's notably cautious action, or inaction in this case, deserved not only mention but serious analysis.An error of commission rather than omission concerns Kennedy's overture to send a message (indirectly, with its origin concealed) to Fidel Castro via Brazil as the crisis climaxed. Plokhy correctly notes (p. 304) that on Friday, 26 October, Kennedy's Executive Committee (ExComm) discussed the idea of sending such a communication to the U.S. embassy in Rio de Janeiro to convey to Brazil's government, which would then relay it to Castro through Brazil's ambassador in Havana. In the message, Brazil would tell Castro that if he got rid of the Soviet missiles, Cuba would be welcomed back into the Hemisphere by the United States (with the implication that this would include the lifting of economic sanctions). However, Plokhy then writes: “The instructions were never sent to Brazil, and Castro was never approached by the Brazilians.” Wrong, on both counts. The U.S. State Department in fact transmitted the draft message to the U.S. embassy in Brazil and telephoned Saturday night to approve delivery. After the text was translated into Portuguese, U.S. Ambassador Lincoln Gordon carried it in a midnight visit to Brazilian Prime Minister (and acting Foreign Minister) Hermes Lima. Brazilian President João Goulart then sent to Havana an aide, General Albino Silva, who met Castro two days later.Readers of the Journal of Cold War Studies may recall this tale, insofar as I recounted it (at considerable length) in a two-part article in the journal in 2004.9 Quite aside from the egotistical desire to see one's scholarship cited, Nuclear Folly’s distortion of this episode raises the broader question of how thoroughly Plokhy scavenged the relevant literature, particularly in key journals. His book is also marred by numerous errors.10 Even though most are comparatively minor, they are regrettable at a time when so much information is available.Despite such quibbles, Nuclear Folly is a welcome addition to the voluminous literature on the missile crisis. One can hardly deny the value of alerting a new generation to the real-life case of a nuclear crisis in which both sides erred repeatedly and brought the world to the brink of a catastrophic war, yet narrowly managed to avoid plunging over the precipice. Any chance of a North Korean or Iranian edition?This was a difficult commentary to write. We were very curious and eager to read Serhii Plokhy's book, given our many years of research on the Cuban missile crisis and the publisher's promotional mentions of new Soviet sources, but we ended up disappointed. In one sentence: this is not a book we would assign to our students. The new sources add interesting new details but nothing to the larger narratives of the crisis, and Plokhy's overall treatment misses some crucial parts of the crisis, ranging from John F. Kennedy's decision-making to the actual tactical nuclear weapon deployments by Soviet forces in Cuba.At the same time, Nuclear Folly is a great effort by a prominent scholar to focus on an important subject that is new for him. The book makes important points about mistakes leaders commit and about the dangers that nuclear weapons pose to humankind. The relevance of this book is obvious—there are far more nuclear weapons today than there were in 1962. Miscalculations and acting on the wrong lessons learned could lead decision makers to catastrophe. Thus, the Cuban missile crisis remains an inexhaustible source for analysis and lessons.We have been researching and writing about the Cuban missile crisis for more than three decades. Our organization, the National Security Archive, brought the lawsuit with Philip Brenner that led to the declassification of the letters exchanged by Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev during the crisis. Our work with the Freedom of Information Act and with crisis veterans produced the document briefing books for each of the “critical oral history” conferences organized by James Blight and janet Lang (based at Harvard University, then Brown University, and now Waterloo University in Canada) in 1987, 1989, 1991, and 1992 that revolutionized studies of the Cuban missile crisis. We organized the 2002 Havana conference that made global headlines by revealing that nuclear torpedoes had been carried on Soviet submarines patrolling near the quarantine line, a story that figures repeatedly in Plokhy's book.The lead author of this commentary was present at the very moment that Plokhy describes in the first paragraph of his prologue. At the conference table in Havana in 1992, Robert McNamara, in disbelief, turned to her and asked whether the translation of General Anatolii Gribkov's statement about tactical nuclear weapons in Cuba was correct. General Gribkov's revelations marked a turning point in missile crisis historiography and helped spur a flood of evidence from Soviet sources that cast even further doubt on the simplistic versions of the crisis that had been promoted by the Kennedy administration and echoed in early accounts of the showdown.Plokhy's new Soviet sources do make a contribution to the history of the Cuban missile crisis, mainly by putting Ukraine on the map of the events. What is new in Nuclear Folly are the stories of numerous soldiers, sailors, and missile forces officers who were deployed from Soviet Ukraine to Cuba (and back) in 1962. Plokhy benefited from the help of the terrific staff at the Branch State Archive of the Security Service of Ukraine, where the Soviet-era Ukrainian State Security (KGB) files are located. The archive director, Andriy Kohut, and his aide Maria Panova deservedly come first in the book's acknowledgments. (More scholars of the Soviet era need to make use of these invaluable archives.) The Ukrainian KGB documents cited by Plokhy include a handful of fascinating reports from KGB military counterintelligence officers embedded with the units deployed from Ukraine, citing complaints and disgruntlement especially. Previous accounts of the implementation of Operation Anadyr relied mainly on recollections of members of the Moscow International Organization of Veterans of Foreign Wars and the Moscow-based organization of Cuban missile crisis veterans, so the view from Ukraine is useful and new.Drawing on published memoirs of military officers deployed to Cuba, the book also presents vivid images of the characters involved, such as Marshal Sergei Biryuzov, commander of the Strategic Missile Forces; his deputy, Vladimir Tolubko; and Major-General Igor Statsenko, one of the key commanders in Cuba, who led the 43rd Missile Division, which was armed with R-12 (medium range) and R-14 (intermediate range) missiles. Plokhy follows these commanders from their departure points in Ukraine to their deployment in Cuba while providing detailed back stories. The book explains why the cavalryman General Issa Pliev was appointed commander of the Group of Soviet Forces in Cuba rather than General Pavel Dankevich from the missile forces, who had been widely expected to be chosen for the top post. Pliev had a long connection with Minister of Defense Rodion Malinovskii and had fought under him in Stalingrad, where he distinguished himself with his courage. In June 1962, Pliev showed his firmness and loyalty again by brutally suppressing a popular uprising in the city of Novocherkassk. Khrushchev wanted a tough, reliable officer to lead the most important Soviet deployment and military outpost in the world, and he approved Pliev's appointment at the last minute in early July. Plokhy rightly describes the newly appointed commander as “old, sickly and incompetent” (p. 80).Plokhy also adds vivid details to the story of the July 1962 reconnaissance mission led by Pliev, Statsenko, and Major-General Leonid Garbuz. In contrast to the optimistic accounts sent back by Marshal Biryuzov in early June claiming that missiles could easily be hidden in the Cuban palm groves, the delegation in July came up with contrasting and far more pessimistic accounts about the Cuban landscape, climate, and conditions for deployment.Probably the most interesting part of Nuclear Folly is the description of the sea voyage from the Black Sea ports to Cuba, for which Plokhy uses the KGB informer reports and intercepted letters to good effect. This narrative gives one a full understanding of the grand scale of Operation Anadyr and also of the human suffering involved as soldiers and sailors had to cross the Atlantic in secrecy and in often inhumane, crowded conditions hidden below the deck of civilian transport ships. Here is the story of the botched appendectomy on the ship Ilya Mechnikov, where secrecy prevented the ship's mechanic from being transferred to a hospital on shore that could have saved his life. Here are the interesting conversations on board the ships where older officers complain about the younger cohort who are “insufficiently dedicated to Communist ideals” as a result of Khrushchev's de-Stalinization campaign. Some of the sailors complained that they were being sent to Cuba, which would extend their term of service. Some even questioned whether their fate should be decided in Moscow. These sorts of attitudes, however, are not surprising in light of the Soviet Army's reliance on a universal draft that gave no say to conscripts regarding where they would serve.The Ukrainian KGB reports provide a useful contrast to veterans’ stories that highlight the excitement of going to Cuba (other deployment options would have included Magadan, Murmansk, and other equally inhospitable locations). In fact, submariners told us they dreaded returning to face their wives, who, after preparing to join their husbands in the tropical paradise, were told to unpack and remain on the Kola Peninsula, stuck with Murmansk and polar bears rather than Mariel and palm trees. Plokhy also adds interesting new details about the tasks Soviet troops had to carry out once deployed in Cuba, where they built roads, transported missiles in trucks that could not navigate the existing roads, and built missile launch pads—all in Cuba's hot, wet, tropical climate.Yet the Ukrainian materials shed no light on the high-level decisions taken by Khrushchev, Kennedy, and Fidel Castro that precipitated and then led to the resolution of the crisis, nor does Plokhy's evidence add much to the more authoritative account by Michael Dobbs on the multitude of flashpoints—at the naval “quarantine” line, in the air over Siberia (where a U.S. U-2 spy plane mistakenly ventured), on the ground in Cuba, underwater in the Sargasso Sea—that could have sparked nuclear Armageddon. All of these flashpoints were not under the total control of the leaders, a point Plokhy rightly drives home in both his preface and his conclusion about nuclear dangers and nuclear folly.While derivative, Plokhy's account usefully emphasizes the role West Berlin played in U.S. decision-making during the crisis. The book depicts Kennedy and his advisers as so obsessed with tensions over Germany that they “would judge anything pertaining to Cuba first and foremost with reference to the situation in Berlin” (p. 101). In the recent book Gambling with Armageddon, Martin Sherwin explains how after the summit in Vienna in June 1961, Kennedy became convinced that there was going to be another major crisis over Germany and saw practically any Soviet move as aimed at Berlin.11 Probably the best treatment of the role Berlin played in the minds of U.S. leaders is in Kremlinologist by Sherry Thompson and Jenny Thompson—a biography of U.S. Ambassador Llewellyn Thompson written by his daughters.12 They show that Thompson, Kennedy's “Russia hand,” came back from Moscow with an overwhelming sense that Khrushchev was focused on West Berlin and was preparing his next move there even as he was shipping missiles to Cuba. Thompson's opinion certainly contributed to this exaggerated concern about Berlin among U.S. decision-makers. Plokhy quotes extensively from the Kennedy tapes and memoranda of meetings to show how persistent this attention to Berlin was and how it made the situation appear even more critical. On the other hand, the perceived link between Cuba and Berlin probably made Kennedy more careful as he faced the possibility of nuclear war.On the Soviet side, however, as the book shows, the Berlin issue lost its urgency after the Berlin Wall went up in August 1961. Plokhy quotes Khrushchev's conversation with Walter Ulbricht, the East German Communist party general secretary, in February 1962 in which the Soviet leader argues against a separate peace treaty because the borders were now closed. Plokhy concludes correctly that “Khrushchev did not plan to escalate the Berlin crisis.” However, it is probably an overstatement to say that “Khrushchev was playing his Berlin card to distract the president's attention from Cuba” (p. 101). From the available Soviet Presidium minutes, we know that no Berlin actions were planned in connection with developments in Cuba and that the Berlin issue barely came up during the actual days of the Cuban missile crisis. This is important because a lot of U.S. historiography misses the fact that Kennedy's preoccupation with Berlin resulted from a misreading of Khrushchev's intentions.The biggest problem with Plokhy's book is its superficial treatment of the historiography of the crisis. Plokhy stands on the shoulders of giants but does not acknowledge their work fully. His historiography section is barely one paragraph long and is limited to mentions of Graham Allison, Philip Zelikow, Aleksandr Fursenko with Timothy Naftali, and “an excellent journalistic investigation by Michael Dobbs” (which is in fact a very serious historical study relying on a meticulous analysis of new archival, photographic, and naval logs data combined with numerous interviews of veterans).13What is omitted here is extremely important. As Plokhy well knows, practically all of the new findings and breakthroughs in the study of the Cuban missile crisis were made in the framework of the pioneering project organized and carried out for twenty years by Blight and Lang. These results were published in several books of original research and conference transcripts that became the launching pad, a sine qua non, for most subsequent studies of the Cuban missile crisis.14 In fact, many of the Cuban publications translated into English and cited by Plokhy are based on Spanish transcripts by Cuban participants in the same conferences.Blight and Lang created a unique method—critical oral history—that helped to build trust between veterans and scholars from the United States, Cuba, and the former Soviet Union and aided their efforts to secure the release of relevant archival materials in all three countries.15 The project generated thousands of pages of documents in partnership with the National Security Archive that are now available to scholars on the websites of the National Security Archive and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars—documents that Plokhy uses extensively. It was during a session of the Blight/Lang conference in January 1992 that Gribkov made his remarkable statement that the Soviet Union had delivered not only missiles but also nuclear warheads, tactical nuclear weapons, and some 42,000 combat personnel to Cuba (Plokhy's narrative starts with a description of Gribkov's account in 1992), and it was at another conference of the same project in 2002 that a Russian veteran Vadim Orlov, revealed information about the dangerous situation involving a Soviet submarine armed with a nuclear torpedo, to which Plokhy devotes a separate chapter (the original revelation was published by the Russian journalist Aleksandr Mozgovoi in his book based on Orlov's account).16Plokhy's book also does not acknowledge the enormous work of Sergo Mikoyan (son of Anastas Mikoyan) in trying to save his father's archive, open his documents in the Russian archives, and produce an authoritative narrative and document reader (as compared to Aleksandr Fursenko, who obtained exclusive access to documents and prevented other scholars from seeing them until long after his own book was published).17 This is not to deprecate the importance and quality of the research produced by Fursenko and Naftali in their two books and articles. They were pioneers in their own way, embarking on the first serious study of the crisis based on the archival evidence from Moscow.But Plokhy's superficial account of the historiography leads to hyperbolic claims in the book about having pursued a “road . . . rarely traveled before” (p. xvi) when in fact the road he follows has long been an autobahn. Contrary to Plokhy's claim that his book is challenging a “dominant narrative” centered on Kennedy's supposedly astute brinkmanship, none of the major accounts of the Cold War written in the past 30 years have offered this sort of narrative. The depiction of Kennedy as a fearless “hawk” was the spin proffered by the relieved White House back in 1962, and it found repetition in such early literature as Arthur Schlesinger's Thousand Days (1965), the posthumous Robert F. Kennedy book Thirteen Days (1969), and Graham Allison's overly influential Essence of Decision (1971), but all of those accounts have long been known to be flawed and have been superseded by much better historical analyses, which, among other things, show that Kennedy led the doves, not the hawks.For example, Plokhy claims that the “eyeball to eyeball” remark by Dean Rusk amounted to the “founding myth of the historiography of the Cuban Missile Crisis” (p. 184), but the “eyeball” myth was debunked many years ago. Pushback from Soviet sources as early as 1989, a more definitive rebuff at the 1992 Havana conference, and conclusive debunking by Dobbs in 2008 using U.S. Navy tracking maps combined with Soviet sources left the eyeball myth in tatters long before Plokhy listened to a single Kennedy tape. The core reality of the Cuban missile crisis—that recklessness by both the United States and the Soviet Union brought the world close to Armageddon in 1962 and that both Kennedy and Khrushchev blinked to avoid the nuclear abyss—has been clear from the declassified evidence for more than a quarter century.18Nuclear Folly also completely misses several of the most dramatic moments and components of the crisis. For example, Plokhy collapses into a single paragraph (on p. 156) the intense White House dynamic that unfolded on 20–21 October when Kennedy, opposing the wishes of all his generals and most of his top advisers, decided against an invasion and in favor of a blockade. Plokhy hesitantly hypothesizes, “It appears that the key factor for the president had become the CIA report on the discovery of the eight operational missiles”—which posed a much greater nuclear risk—and quotes a drab protocol noting Kennedy's decision for the blockade rather than an immediate strike.Missing from Plokhy entirely is the actual conversation Kennedy had on 21 October with General Walter Sweeney, head of the Tactical Air Command forces that would have carried out more than 1,000 sorties on the first day if Kennedy had ordered an air strike. Robert McNamara took detailed notes of the Sweeney briefing, and these were published in the National Security Archive's 1992 reader on the crisis and reprinted in full in the volume of transcriptions of Kennedy tapes edited by Ernest May and Philip Zelikow in 1997.19 Kennedy asked Sweeney directly whether that vast armada would succeed in taking out all the missiles. An honest man, Sweeney bragged about his forces but admitted he could not guarantee they could eliminate all the missiles; in fact, he was not even sure that U.S. intelligence agencies had identified all the missiles (he was right—they had not). One of the medium-range Soviet missiles could get through, and the prospect that a single nuclear warhead would strike Atlanta was enough to deter the U.S. president from invading Cuba. Kennedy himself made this point clear at a National Security Council meeting the next day, 22 October, when he explained why he chose the blockade: “As I've said from the beginning, the idea of a quick strike was very tempting and I really didn't give up on that until yesterday morning” after hearing from Sweeney.20For students of deterrence and theories of nuclear warfighting, the Sweeney moment provides one of the definitive lessons of the Cuban missile crisis. As McNamara told Castro at the 1992 Havana conference, it did not matter that the United States had 5,000 deliverable nuclear warheads to the Soviet Union's 300 in 1962.21 The numbers actually amounted to “parity” because a U.S. first strike could not have destroyed all the Soviet missiles, and the resulting damage to the United States from a retaliatory strike would have been “unacceptable.” That insight underpins the Chinese “finite deterrence” nuclear posture to this day. McNamara commented at a Kennedy Presidential Library forum in October 2002 that he “could have kissed Sweeney for his reply” to Kennedy's question back in 1962.22Had Kennedy ordered an invasion of Cuba, nearly 100 Soviet tactical nuclear warheads were ready to take out the incoming fleet. But Plokhy's account refers to only 12 of these tactical weapons—the ones for the short-range Luna missiles based in central Cuba. He writes: “What Khrushchev and others had in mind when they talked about tactical weapons were the Luna nuclear-tipped missiles, which had already been delivered to Cuba” (p. 166). Actually, as Dobbs showed in One Minute to Midnight, the USSR's Frontline Cruise Missiles (FKRs) were far more numerous and dangerous, dispersed across Cuba with a total of 80 nuclear warheads, each of which was the size of the Hiroshima bomb, several times more powerful than the Lunas.23 Dobbs revealed that the Soviet Union deployed an FKR only fifteen miles from the Guantanamo Bay naval base on Friday, 26 October 1962. If U.S. forces had invaded, the base could have become a smoking, radiating ruin, but you would never know this from Plokhy.Plokhy mentions the cruise missiles three times in his book, but twice mistakenly designates them as R-15 missiles (pp. 66, 330). The actual Soviet R-15 was proposed in the 1950s as a submarine-launched ballistic missile but was never built and was later canceled. Perhaps Plokhy came up with the R-15 designation because the cruise missiles were an unpiloted version of the MIG-15 fighter jet.Similar small mistakes and lacunae with larger meaning detract from Plokhy's book. Some of the errors are just sloppiness, as when he describes the four Soviet submarines deployed to Cuba with “nuclear missiles” (p. 169); actually, each had one nuclear-tipped torpedo, not missiles. On p. 174, Plokhy claims that “Washington knew nothing about the nuclear submarines approaching the island” on 23 October; yet the submarines were not nuclear but diesel-powered, and the U.S. Navy had been tracking them from the moment they crossed the sonar-buoy line between Iceland and Norway, and throughout their journeys, by geolocating their radio burst transmissions.Plokhy begins one of his most dramatic sequences by describing Sov