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.

Bruce Allyn

“The most important lesson about crisis management, one that we continue to fail to follow, is ‘never fear to negotiate’.”

“There is one lesson more important: the need to institutionalize the process of learning after such critical historical events.”

Bruce Allyn, “Interview with Mark Thompson: 50 Years Later: The Lessons of the Cuban Missile Crisis” (Time, 10/22)