The Cuban Missile Crisis Revisited

James G. Blight, Joseph S. Nye, Jr., and David A. Welch

From Foreign Affairs, Fall 1987

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Summary:  There is disagreement on the relevance of the Cuban missile crisis to today's world. Either there are many lessons, emphasizing the need for flexibility, precision and caution, or there are none, because the nuclear danger in 1962 was imaginary and represented only a failure to comprehend US military superiority. One can conclude that the crisis should not be dismissed as irrelevant; certain crucial factors have not changed. But there is a need for caution in attempting to read from it simple lessons in crisis management. See also Cohen in 1986:03556

James G. Blight, Joseph S. Nye, Jr., and David A. Welch are, respectively, Executive Director, Director, and Research Fellow of the Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University. Mr. Nye is the author of Nuclear Ethics. Messrs. Blight and Welch are currently working on a book on the Cuban missile crisis. The authors wish to express their thanks to the Carnegie Corporation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

The Cuban missile crisis has assumed genuinely mythic significance. Dean Rusk called it "the most dangerous crisis the world has ever seen," the only time when the nuclear superpowers came "eyeball to eyeball." Theodore Sorensen called it the "Gettysburg of the Cold War." For Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., it was "the finest hour" of the Kennedy presidency; a moment of maximum nuclear peril traversed without catastrophe. Many people believe that the missile crisis of October 1962 represents the closest point that the world has come to nuclear war. For that reason alone, it is worth continued attention.

Since the Cuban missile crisis remains the only nuclear crisis we have experienced, it remains the great laboratory in which to study the art of crisis management. Yet there is little agreement on the lessons it holds for us today. This disagreement was brought into sharp focus at a recent meeting of scholars and former members of the Executive Committee of the National Security Council (ExComm), the group convened by President John F. Kennedy to advise him on the matter of the Soviet missiles in Cuba. Much of the disagreement that came to light at that meeting and in a subsequent series of interviews with key participants revolved around two issues: the course of action that the United States should have taken in 1962; and the relevance of that debate 25 years later.

It is remarkable how little the basic parameters of the dispute about the lessons of the missile crisis have changed over the past quarter-century: either there are many lessons, chiefly emphasizing the need for flexibility, managerial precision and caution in the face of great danger; or there are no lessons, because the nuclear danger of 1962 was almost surely imaginary, a function of a failure to comprehend the pivotal significance of a favorable military balance for the United States. Part of the reason for this standoff, we believe, is due to a too-easy characterization of "hawks" and "doves"?a distinction that originated during the missile crisis itself and continues to the present.

We should be wary of hastily dismissing this event as irrelevant to the present; certain crucial factors have not changed since 1962, or have become all the more important because of the changes in the strategic balance: the psychology of crisis decision-making; the importance of small-group politics; and the risks of inadvertent escalation. But we should also be wary of drawing generalizations that ignore important ways in which the world has changed, that cannot be supported by evidence from a single crisis, and that are insensitive to the fact that diplomatic or strategic successes can rarely be repeated in quite the same way. This last consideration was one President Kennedy himself understood well from his reading of Barbara Tuchman?s The Guns of August. The German leadership in 1914 had expected a repeat of Russia?s backdown in the Bosnian crisis of 1909. Instead, they found themselves embroiled in the costliest war mankind had yet seen.

A useful treatment ...

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