Belfer Center Launches Website Marking Cuban Missile Crisis 50th Anniversary

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Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center Launches Website Marking Cuban Missile Crisis 50th Anniversary

Site Aims to Stimulate Debate on Lessons Learned

Press Release, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard Kennedy School

August 6, 2012

Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs today launches a new website to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Designed to help policymakers, students, and interested citizens draw lessons from these critical events half a century ago, www.cubanmissilecrisis.org not only provides background on the crisis that brought the world to the brink of nuclear disaster in October 1962 but also offers tools to understand how it can inform contemporary policy.

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Belfer Center Director Graham Allison, whose book Essence of Decision continues to be the definitive analysis of the decision-making that prevented a nuclear catastrophe, comments on the significance of the 50th anniversary:

“Fifty years ago, the Cuban Missile Crisis brought the world to the brink of nuclear disaster. During the standoff, President John F. Kennedy thought the chance of escalation to nuclear war was ‘between 1 in 3 and even,’ and what we have learned in later decades has done nothing to lengthen those odds. Such a war might have led to the deaths of 100 million Americans and over 100 million Russians. Fortunately, since the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the risk of all-out nuclear war has shrunk dramatically. Yet the U.S. and the rest of the world still face other kinds of nuclear danger such as nuclear terrorism, which President Obama has described as ‘the most immediate and extreme threat to global security,’ or the collapse of the global nuclear order, which could be as fragile as the global financial order was four years ago, when conventional wisdom declared it to be sound, stable, and resilient.”

The Belfer Center has developed this website not only to mark the 50th anniversary of the moment when mankind came closest to nuclear oblivion, but also to stimulate debate on the lessons from that crisis that can be applied to critical situations facing world leaders today.

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Read more: http://belfercenter.ksg.harvard.edu/publication/22228/harvard_kennedy_schools_belfer_center_launches_website_marking_cuban_missile_crisis_50th_anniversary.html

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1. "the global nuclear order...could be as fragile as the global financial order was four years ago"

Yet the U.S. and the rest of the world still face other kinds of nuclear danger such as nuclear terrorism, which President Obama has described as ‘the most immediate and extreme threat to global security,’ or the collapse of the global nuclear order, which could be as fragile as the global financial order was four years ago, when conventional wisdom declared it to be sound, stable, and resilient.”

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2. Anatomy of a Controversey

If the Cuban Missile Crisis was the most dangerous passage of the Cold War, the most dangerous moment of the Cuban Missile Crisis was the evening of Saturday, 27 October 1962, when the resolution of the crisis—war or peace—appeared to hang in the balance. While Soviet ships had not attempted to break the U.S naval blockade of Cuba, Soviet nuclear missile bases remained on the island and were rapidly becoming operational, and pressure on President Kennedy to order an air strike or invasion was mounting, especially after an American l -2 reconnaissance plane was shot down over Cuba that Saturday afternoon and its pilot killed. Hopes that a satisfactory resolution to the crisis could be reached between Washington and Moscow had dimmed, moreover, when a letter from Soviet leader Nikita S. Khrushchev arrived Saturday morning demanding that the United States agree to remove its Jupiter missiles from Turkey in exchange for a Soviet removal of missiles from Cuba. The letter struck U.S. officials as an ominous hardening of the Soviet position from the previous day's letter from Khrushchev, which had omitted any mention of American missiles in Turkey but had instead implied that Washington's pledge not to invade Cuba would be sufficient to obviate the need for Soviet nuclear protection of Castro's revolution.

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/nsa/cuba_mis_cri/moment.htm

Yes - the moral of course being don't build bases in Turkey or anywhere else in Europe come to that.