Their relatives might have been on opposite sides of near-nuclear war, but the US and Soviet leader’s descendants have teamed up for an intimate BBC podcast. They talk humanity, hate – and why Trump is a ‘very limited’ man
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n October 1962, the world came closer to destruction than at any other point in modern times. After a US surveillance plane discovered that Soviet nuclear missile sites were being built in Cuba, less than 100 miles from the US mainland, President John F Kennedy responded by ordering the US Navy’s Sixth Fleet to impose a naval blockade around the island. Almost two weeks of impossible tension followed.
The threat was clear. If Kennedy, or his Soviet counterpart, Nikita Khrushchev, fired on their enemy, a chain reaction of global nuclear strikes and counterstrikes would have followed, plunging humanity into all-out ruination.
The Cuban missile crisis has been covered endlessly, in books and films and television programmes. But for its third season, the BBC World Service podcast The Bomb has brought a completely new element to the story. It is jointly hosted by Max Kennedy and Nina Khrushcheva, relatives of the men who, for 13 days, held the fate of the world in their hands.
