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.

Sergo Mikoyan

“Adventurism is a dangerous thing. It is difficult to get away with it without drastic results. I believe the main lesson is for big countries not to be adventurist.” (p. 284)

Lesson: Major powers should avoid dangerous foreign policy adventures.

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).

————————————————————————–.