Nikita Khrushchev appears in The Bob Zadek Show excerpts as a figure invoked in arguments about American foreign policy rather than as the subject of a dedicated discussion. Across two episodes, guests cite Khrushchev’s conduct during the Cuban Missile Crisis and his statements about Soviet wartime losses to support claims about military bases and threat exaggeration.
Khrushchev and the Jupiter missiles in Turkey
In an episode with John Glaser, Bob Zadek framed the discussion around whether the presence of U.S. military bases works against world peace rather than for it. Glaser argued that the Washington foreign policy establishment holds a misplaced confidence in the effectiveness of U.S. military force and bases to make bad things go away, and that the expansion of NATO and U.S. bases further east into Europe is a source of anxiety and resentment in Moscow Rethinking Pax Americana with John Glaser (2017).
Glaser then turned to the Cuban Missile Crisis as a historical example. He said the Soviet Union placed missiles in Cuba ninety miles off the U.S. shore, and that what is often left out of the history is that the Kennedy administration placed Jupiter missiles in Turkey a matter of months prior. The aim, he said, was to deter the Soviet Union, but it had the opposite of its intended effect. According to Glaser, Khrushchev told his Cuban ambassador, and also wrote a letter to President Kennedy, that Turkey was right on the Soviet border, and that while the United States said it was nervous about Cuba, at least there were ninety miles of ocean between Cuba and the United States. Glaser’s point was that encircling an adversary with bases and troops does not always produce a docile, passive power ready to capitulate, and can instead antagonize it to act out, creating instability rather than stability Rethinking Pax Americana with John Glaser (2017).
Bob Zadek picked up the theme, noting that recent Hollywood and television productions dramatizing the crisis had made apparent that the missiles in Turkey were very important to Russia, and that Russia reacted almost in kind. In Bob’s framing, the Russian reaction of putting missiles in Cuba was quite natural, and the presence of the Jupiter missiles in Turkey almost caused nuclear war. Bob also said the productions made apparent a little-known fact: that Kennedy agreed to Khrushchev’s terms—that the Soviets would take their missiles out of Cuba and the United States would quietly, after everything calmed down, remove the missiles from Turkey, which they did. In Bob’s telling, the Russian tactic of threatening to put missiles in Cuba actually worked and created a bit of stability where there had been instability Rethinking Pax Americana with John Glaser (2017).
The excerpt attributes the historical claims about the Jupiter missiles and the Khrushchev letter to Glaser, and the framing of the crisis as a natural Russian reaction, along with the account of the Kennedy–Khrushchev agreement, to Bob Zadek. The excerpt does not state what became of the missiles beyond Bob’s statement that they were removed.
Khrushchev and Cold War threat inflation
In an episode with John Mueller, the discussion concerned the exaggeration of national security threats as a tool of American foreign policy. Bob Zadek put it to Mueller that overstatement of threats is a go-to device used to support military buildups and divert enormous resources to goals that are not objectively important China & the Stupidity of War (2022).
Mueller offered the Cold War as the most impressive area of threat exaggeration, saying he had a whole chapter on it. He described the argument that because the Soviet Union had allowed North Korea to attack South Korea, it was hell-bent on conquest throughout the world and would soon be willing to attack Western Europe, which is why NATO, previously a thing on paper, suddenly escalated massively and militarily. Mueller said it was pretty obvious during the Cold War, and that a few people such as George Kennan and Bernard Brodie said so, that the Soviets never had the slightest interest in getting into anything resembling World War II again, much less one with nuclear weapons, and were not likely to attack Western Europe, though they were interested in supporting revolutionary movements and civil wars in other countries China & the Stupidity of War (2022).
Mueller said the idea that the Soviets were a major threat was nonetheless sold, and that trillions of dollars were spent on it. He cited one calculation that the amount spent on nuclear weapons and delivery systems during the Cold War was about enough to buy everything in the United States except for the land. Information coming out of the Soviet archives after the Cold War, he said, indicated that the Soviets never planned to attack Western Europe and were planning to defend themselves if attacked. To illustrate the Soviet attitude, Mueller said one would need to find somebody in the Soviet Union, from a top commissar to a drunk on a park bench, who said World War II was wonderful and ought to be done again. Instead, he said, they would say things like what Khrushchev said: that comrades abroad say Khrushchev is afraid of war, that he would like to see the bloody fool who is not afraid of war, that he lost his son in that war, that every Russian family lost somebody in that war except those families which lost whole families, and that they never want to do anything like that again China & the Stupidity of War (2022).
Mueller’s use of Khrushchev here is as a witness to Soviet war-weariness, deployed against the claim that the Soviet Union was bent on attacking Western Europe. The excerpt presents the quotation as Mueller’s rendering of what Khrushchev said, without giving a source or date for it.
Across episodes
The two episodes touch Khrushchev at different points and for different purposes: the Glaser episode uses his response to the Jupiter missiles in Turkey to argue that U.S. bases and encirclement can provoke rather than deter, while the Mueller episode uses his statement about Soviet losses in World War II to argue that Cold War threat inflation was sold despite Soviet reluctance to fight again. The excerpts show no development or change in treatment between the earlier and later episode; each guest invokes Khrushchev independently as evidence for a distinct argument, and neither episode responds to the other.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not provide a biographical account of Khrushchev, his rise to power, his tenure as Soviet leader, or his removal from office. They do not state his title, the dates of his leadership, or the outcome of the Cuban Missile Crisis beyond Bob Zadek’s statement that the missiles were removed from Turkey. The Khrushchev quotation in the Mueller episode is given without a source, date, or occasion, and the excerpts do not say where or when he said it. No excerpt addresses Khrushchev’s domestic policies, his relations with other Soviet figures, or his legacy.