‘Nuclear Folly’ Review: The Big Red Gamble by James Rosen wsj.com

On Oct. 23, 1962, a delegation of prominent Romanians arrived at the Kremlin to meet Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev. Their host was foul of mood. Boorish and suspicious by nature, the strongman had spent a sleepless night deliberating with the Presidium over what to do in the escalating crisis for which Khrushchev himself was responsible: his secret installation, across that summer, of nuclear-weapons systems and some 40,000 Soviet troops in Cuba.

Aerial reconnaissance revealed the installations to the Americans on Oct. 14, and President Kennedy, in a televised address eight days later, announced a naval quarantine to block delivery of additional weapons to the island. All sides—with the exception, perhaps, of Fidel Castro, who relished Havana’s role at the center of world events—feared that any display of aggressiveness, or miscalculation, could trigger an apocalyptic nuclear exchange.

At the reception in their honor, the Romanians watched Soviet Defense Minister Marshal Malinovsky approach his boss with bad news: The U.S. Navy was on high alert, readying the blockade. “Khrushchev flew into a rage,” Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, a Romanian communist leader, reported later to Romanian intelligence. The premier was “yelling, cursing and issuing an avalanche of contradictory orders.” He “threatened to ‘nuke’ the White House, and cursed loudly every time anyone pronounced the words America or American.”

The vast literature on the Cuban Missile Crisis has made it a case study across scholarly disciplines: intelligence analysis, nuclear brinkmanship, game theory, organizational psychology. To this literature, the Oct. 23 Kremlin outburst—which appears midway through Serhii Plokhy’s superb “Nuclear Folly: A History of the Cuban Missile Crisis”—would appear to mark a significant contribution: an eyewitness account of one of the saga’s two key decision makers exhibiting not only uncontrolled anger but delirium. Khrushchev’s threat to “nuke” the White House, his “avalanche of contradictory orders,” constitute the most troubling behavior we could imagine in a leader “managing” such a crisis.

Nuclear Folly

By Serhii Plokhy 
Norton, 444 pages, $35

And indeed, a review of some acclaimed previous studies, such as Michael Beschloss’s “The Crisis Years” (1991), Michael Dobbs’s “One Minute to Midnight” (2008) and the revised edition of Graham T. Allison’s 1971 political-science classic “Essence of Decision” (1999, co-authored by Philip Zelikow), finds none of them mentioning this shocking scene—nor the one Gheorghiu-Dej witnessed at breakfast the next day. This time the bad news came from the KGB’s Vladimir Semichastny: a cable reporting that Kennedy had canceled a trip to Brazil to oversee the quarantine. Mr. Plokhy, a professor of history at Harvard, provides this account, drawing on Gheorghiu-Dej’s report: “Khrushchev’s face grew red as he read the cable. He started ‘cursing like a bargeman,’ threw the paper on the floor, and stamped on it with his heel. ‘That’s how I’m going to crush that viper,’ he shouted, also calling Kennedy a ‘millionaire’s whore.’ ”

Another arresting passage unmentioned in the earlier books relates the confession of Vasilii Kuznetsov, the Soviet deputy foreign minister: “From the very beginning of the crisis, fear of the possible course of further developments arose within the Soviet leadership and increased with every passing hour.” 

Mr. Plokhy’s endnotes frequently cite Russian and Ukrainian sources: declassified KGB documents, memoirs of retired Soviet apparatchiks, studies by Russian scholars, much of it new to English readers. The range of such references conveys the scope of the author’s research and explains how he could add so much to the documentary record of a subject covered so voluminously. “Nuclear Folly” is an immense scholarly achievement, engrossing and terrifying, surely one of the most important books ever written about the Cuban Missile Crisis and 20th-century international relations.

The central conclusion here—that the U.S. and U.S.S.R., hobbled by poor information, made decisions in the dark—is amply illustrated, if not new. Other arguments appear less persuasive. Mr. Plokhy posits a re-examination of October 1962 as useful in redressing today’s nuclear proliferation—an attempt at latter-day relevance that this book, a landmark in its field of study, didn’t need. Relatedly, he laments the Trump administration’s withdrawal from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, signed by President Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in 1987. But aside from a few broad policy prescriptions, Mr. Plokhy provides no insight into how the U.S. policy makers of 2019 should have handled an arms-control agreement negotiated with an entity that no longer exists, an accord that was no longer being honored by the Russian Federation.

Though never stated explicitly, the great lesson of “Nuclear Folly” is that authoritarianism corrupts decision making. Mr. Plokhy recounts how Soviet Air Forces commander Sergei Biriuzov, dispatched to Havana in advance, falsely assured Khrushchev that the Cuban terrain would conceal the missiles from U-2 overflights. Biriuzov knew better but “probably felt that he had no choice,” Mr. Plokhy writes. This absence of candor compounded the Soviet leader’s innate deficiencies. His interaction with the Presidium “was nothing like the meetings of ExCom,” the author notes, referring to the unit of the National Security Council that Kennedy convened for crisis deliberations. With few exceptions, Soviet officials were expected “to approve and endorse Khrushchev’s decisions or to remain silent.”

The most forceful argument in “Nuclear Folly,” then, isn’t for a particular approach to non-proliferation but rather for the tactical advantage enjoyed, in times of crisis and beyond, by liberal democracies. Only such governments allow the freedom of thought necessary for its leaders to fashion sound assessments when they discover a strategic adversary, armed with a hostile ideology and weapons of mass destruction, is on the move.

Mr. Rosen is a Washington correspondent for the Sinclair Broadcast Group and the author of “Cheney One on One.”

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