The scary one …….. October 1962 …… one to listen to

Now, anyone born just a few years either side of 1950, will remember the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Atomic bombing of Nagasaki on August 9, 1945

Even now a full fifty-nine years after those days in the October of 1962 I can feel a sense of foreboding and that was nothing to the emotions I felt back at the time.

Some are still all too vivid and the power comes from reliving them through the memory of a twelve year old.

I was playing rugby out in Ewell and on that Saturday morning I kept looking for that mushroom cloud which I was convinced would appear.

Nor was I alone in picking up on that sense of uncertainty.  My friend Robin who is a year younger was also keenly aware of the events remembering “going into a room and my parents conversations falling away into silence.”

It is an event I written about.*

There have benn other “nuclear crises”, some of which are less well known, but Cuba always will have the power to scare me stiff.

So, I shall be listening to Nuclear destruction, which was broadcast this morning on Radio 4 and is available to listen to right now.**

“In 1962 the world teetered on the edge of nuclear destruction as the Presidents of the USA and the Soviet Union fought over Soviet warheads installed on the islands of Cuba. In Nuclear Folly: A New History of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the historian Serhii Plokhy retells the tortuous decision-making and calculated brinkmanship of John F Kennedy, Nikita Khrushchev and Fidel Castro. He tells Amol Rajan it was ultimately fear that saved the planet, and it’s time to draw lessons from the many mistakes that were made at the time.

The Cold War era did produce a nuclear arms-control agreement – the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty – signed in 1987. But the nuclear physicist and former director of the UN Institute for Disarmament Research Patricia Lewis says that in 2019 the United States and Russia withdrew their support. Lewis, who now leads the International Security programme at Chatham House, asks whether we are now entering a second nuclear age.

The BBC journalist Sarah Rainsford visited the sites of the Soviet Union's nuclear stations in Cuba when she was posted there in 2011. She wrote about her experiences and the end of the Castro era in Our Woman in Havana. Rainsford is now the BBC’s Moscow correspondent and explores how far Khrushchev’s political scheming and disinformation compare to the strategy of President Putin.

Producer: Katy Hickman”

Picture, Atomic bombing of Nagasaki on August 9, 1945, Charles Levy from one of the B-29 Superfortresses used in the attack, This image is a work of a U.S. Army soldier or employee, taken or made as part of that person's official duties

*The missiles of October 1962 ............... when great events are remembered by children,https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.com/2016/10/the-missiles-of-october-1962-when-great.html

**Nuclear destruction, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000v1mz