- “For the student or citizen, the chapters on the Missile Crisis are meant to make persuasive an unhappy, troubling, but inescapable fact about this world. No event demonstrates more clearly than the Missile Crisis that with respect to nuclear war there is an awesome crack between unlikelihood and impossibility. Especially in the aftermath of the Cold War, most people would like to imagine that the nuclear sword of Damocles has been carefully lowered and put away, even if it has not been hammered into a plowshare. But in fact the superpower nuclear arsenals and stockpiles, even if diminished, are still in the U.S. and Russia today and will remain there for the foreseeable future (highly enriched uranium having a half-life of three quarters of a million years).” (p. xii)
Lesson: Beware; nuclear war is still possible.
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- “While the adversarial competition between the U.S. and Soviet Union that led to the Missile Crisis has now faded, other nuclear risks have arisen. For reasons that will become evident in the conceptual chapters, the risk of one or more nuclear weapons exploding on American soil may even be greater now than during the last decades of the Cold War.” (xii)
Lesson: While Cold War is over, be alert for new nuclear dangers.
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Essence of Decision also provides a political scientific analysis of decision-making. Allison and Zelikow identified three models of decision-making: Models I, II, and III. Model I focused on decision-making from the perspective of a state as a rational actor. The second Model focuses on the role of organizations within a government as actors in a collaborative decision-making model. The third model focuses on “governmental politics” and the role of individual policymakers and statesmen negotiating and deliberating to form policy. The following are lessons drawn from the Missile Crisis using these three models.
1. Lessons from Model I:
- Since nuclear war between the U.S. and Soviet Union would have been mutual suicide, neither nation would choose nuclear war; nuclear war not a serious possibility.
- Given its strategic nuclear advantage at the time, the U.S. could choose lower-level military actions without fearing escalation to nuclear war.
- Nuclear crises manageable; when vital interests at stake, leaders of both nations will think soberly about the challenge and their options and find limited actions to resolve disputes short of war.
2. Lessons from Model II:
- Nuclear crises inherently chancy; information and estimates available to leaders reflect organizational capacities and routines as well as facts.
- Leaders presented with much narrower options than the menu that analysts might consider desirable.
- Organizational rigidities and even mistakes crucial for U.S. success.
- Problem of control and coordination of large organizations, so prescription to put thought into the routines established in principal organizations before a crisis.
3. Lessons from Model III:
- U.S. leaders can choose actions that they believe entail real possibilities of escalation to war.
- Process of crisis management obscure and exceedingly risky.
- Interaction of internal games within White House or Kremlin could yield war, even nuclear war as an outcome. Mix of personality, expertise, influence, and temperament that allows a group to clarify alternatives even while it bargains over separate preferences must be better understood.
Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis (New York: Longman, 1999).
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