Cuban Missile Crisis | Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center has created this site as a resource for the Cuban Missile Crisis. Designed to help policymakers, students, and interested citizens draw lessons from these critical events half a century ago, this site 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.

MAP OF MISSILE RANGE IN CUBA

RFK had jokingly asked whether the missiles could hit Oxford, MS, where federal marshals had intervened only two weeks earlier, so Oxford was included. PSALM was the special codeword for intelligence data on missiles in Cuba, a compartment created at JFK’s insistence for greater control of this sensitive information. (National Security Archive)
JFK ANNOUNCES THE U.S. NAVAL BLOCKADE OF CUBA

(National Security Archive)

October 22, 1962
THE LONELIEST JOB

JFK in Oval Office. (Photo by George Tames, New York Times)

February 10, 1961
REMOVAL OF MISSILE ERECTORS AND TRANSPORTERS

Low-level photography reveals Soviet removal of missile erectors and transporters at San Cristobal. (National Security Archive)

October 29, 1962
THE SOVIET SHIP ANSOV DEPARTING FROM CUBA DURING THE CRISIS

(ARC Identifier 595365 / Local Identifier 306-N-62-7101; Item from Record Group 306: Records of the U.S. Information Agency, 1900 – 2003)

November 6, 1962

Announcements

The Belfer Center has launched its first iTunes U course, "Cuban Missile Crisis: 50 Years Later," which is available for Apple iPads and iPhones.

Watch video of the Institute of Politics Forum, 'Lessons from the Cuban Missile Crisis, Then and Now'

Download our tools for middle school, high school, and college teachers to engage students in thinking about this decisive chapter in American and world history.

The Belfer Center and Foreign Policy Magazine are delighted to announce the winning entries of the Lessons of the Cuban Missile Crisis contest. Get a list of the winners and runners-up here.

Read Andre Kokoshin's new paper 'Reflections on the Cuban Missile Crisis in the Context of Strategic Stability'