- “Already we are beginning to see the inexorable process by which historical events when they recede far enough into the past, take on an antiquarian quality and gradually lose their visceral potency. Consider the American Civil War…with every passing year we look upon the Civil War with greater and greater detachment…So it will be with the Cuban Missile Crisis. Already the number of people with clear personal memories of the event is dwindling… every year it gets harder and harder to explain to people who have no living memory of the Cold War how it was that the United States and the Soviet Union could maneuver themselves into a position where they almost destroyed the world in order to preserve the essential conditions of nuclear deterrence on whose threat of mutual destruction they believed the very safety of the world depended.” ( 401-402)
- “Every young driver should have a brush with disaster soon after acquiring his or her driver’s license, for this is the surest cure for recklessness and exuberance behind the wheel. Those fortunate enough to have had a near miss will know how much their driving improved as a result of it—for a while, at least. As the memory fades, though, so does the effect. And if there is no memory—if the experience was someone else’s merely related in speech—the beneficial effect is likely to be mild and fleeting…” (p. 403)
Lesson: As time passes and memory fades, people look at the Cuban Missile Crisis with greater detachment, losing sight of how dangerous the crisis was. Be wary that many will forget its lessons.
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- “The Cuban Missile Crisis was a spectacular near miss with enduring, even timeless relevance. Its central lessons—of dangers of political and cultural myopia; of failing to communicate; of misperception, misjudgment, and inadvertence; of failing to make an effort to see the world as one’s adversaries see it; of putting too much faith in the efficacy of threat; of assuming that one’s own motives are transparently benign—are as germane today as they were in 1962…” (p. 403)
Lessons: Be wary of the dangers of political and cultural myopia, of failure to communicate, misperception, failure to put yourself in your opponents’ shoes, of putting faith in efficacy of military threats, and of assuming that one’s motives are benign.
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- “President Kennedy, of course, had already come to realize at the climax of the crisis that he did not know, and could not control, all of the actions of his own military…it was largely a matter of great good fortune that things did not get out of hand. Particularly dangerous, in our view, was the combination of misperceptions and misjudgments at the highest levels of the civilian leadership in both the United States and the Soviet Union, the sheer complexity of the military systems they sought to control, and the tensions in both countries between civilian leaders who sought primarily to keep matters from spinning out of control, and military leaders who advocated playing hardball.” (406-407)
Lesson: Luck prevented things from getting out of hand; civilian leaders must have control over the military’s actions.
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- “…if the United States and the Soviet Union—two countries favored technologically, unfettered by resource constraints, and fortunate to enjoy a long and stable tradition of civilian control over a professional military establishment—could stumble to the brink of disaster not in spite of having nuclear weapons, but because of nuclear weapons, the implication for countries less advantaged in these respects was clear: nuclear weapons are a problem, not a solution. The nuclear genie is better left in the bottle.” (407)
Lesson: Aspiring nuclear states should know that nuclear weapons are a problem, not a solution.
James G. Blight, Bruce J. Allyn, and David A. Welch. Cuba on the Brink: Castro, the Missile Crisis, and the Soviet Collapse. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1993)..