- “We talk an awful lot about the American conventional and nuclear superiority and its importance in forcing the outcome. If we’d had that, we could have just invaded and overwhelmed Cuba. Well, why didn’t we? It was because a small, ragtail nuclear deterrent on the other side was a powerful deterrent to us.” (25-26)
Lesson: In a nuclear world, even a small, “ragtag” nuclear deterrent can significantly alter one’s behavior.
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- We should obviously use our Soviet specialists, but there’s a problem with relying on expertise too heavily, and that is that these people often have a very particular reading of the Soviet Union. Nothing substitutes for a little direct experience of the Soviets, and I think for that reason there is a strong argument for much wider contacts with them. (102)
Lesson: Use experts who have direct experience with the other side e.g. they have visited and lived in the other country.
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- As far as world opinion is concerned, it would be a mistake to overemphasize this today. In 1962, NATO was less suspicious of the United States, and we had a base of support in the OAS because the Alliance for Progress had worked to some extent….You don’t garner world opinion in the last week of a crisis; you need to have it going in. (p. 102)
Lesson: Before crises, cultivate potential allies. You will need their support going in.
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- The tendency is for us to compartmentalize the different options. In fact, we used all of the options except for the air strike. We used an orchestrated approach on a wide variety of fronts. The mixture of options is what did the trick, not any one of them. (p. 103)
Lesson: Multiple approaches conducted together will do much more than just one option by itself.
Cited in James G. Blight and David Welch, On the Brink: Americans and Soviets reexamine the Cuban Missile Crisis (New York: Hill and Wang, 1989).
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