Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Hundreds of books have been written on the Cuban Missile Crisis,
thousands and maybe tens of thousands of articles,
I really don't know.
If you look it up on Wikipedia you will see it will take awhile to go from front to back,
it's a long entry.
And there's a lot of facts in there,
and some of our research is represented,
and the research of people all over the world.
So, I'm going to write another one.
Why? Why after all this time and all this data,
why almost 50 years later is another book necessary?
Another book is necessary because you don't get it yet.
Nobody gets it yet.
The Cuban Missile Crisis is an event we study exclusively because of what did not happen.
I don't know if you can think of other events like that.
Maybe you can, but I can't think of anything that really quite fits this.
It didn't happen.
That's why we don't get it,
because the further we get from it -- historically speaking,
in years and months, the further we get from it the more it seems for some reason like it couldn't happen.
"It" being an all out nuclear war.
It couldn’t happen.
The reasons pile up.
Oh my goodness, well the Americans had nuclear superiority,
the Soviet's wouldn't do anything, blah blah blah.
This book, “The Armageddon Letters”
just sweeps away the last 48, 49, whatever years
and we go right back to the source, right at the moment,
when nuclear war seemed probable
to the three leaders: Fidel Castro, John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev.
Forget what these scholars have told you.
Forget what your own instincts tell you
about how things had to be the way they were because they were the way they were.
As a matter of fact, what you will discover in the Armageddon Letters,
which is like a triple biography of one week in the lives of three of the most interesting people in the history of this planet:
Kennedy, Khrushchev and Castro.
Triple bio, one week long, that's the book, with commentary.
But what you will find if you get back to where they were
If you get right back to the last part of October in 1962,
you go with them,
you go right into that bunker where Castro was writing his letters to Khrushchev,
you go with Khrushchev twenty miles outside of Moscow
where he is drafting underground in another bunker, the letters to Kennedy.
You go with Kennedy who refused to go into a bunker
but who had the papers in his hand in case things got out of hand,
that he would be on a train
bound for the hills of West Virginia in another bunker from which he would be writing his letters.
You get into the bunkers with these three guys and you know what you're going to find?
They thought nuclear war was about to break out
and they didn't think there was a damn thing they could do about it.
Is that scary? I think so.
Have we gotten it yet?
I don’t think so.