Valerian Zorin was the Soviet Union’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations during the Cuban Missile Crisis. In a heated exchange at the October 25 emergency meeting of the UN Security Council, Zorin was famously confronted by U.S. Ambassador to the UN Adlai Stevenson with photographic evidence of the Soviet missiles in Cuba and challenged to admit their existence. Zorin stubbornly denied the charges and questioned the photographs’ authenticity.
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.