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.

Les Gelb

“The real lesson of the Cuban missile crisis for getting out of Afghanistan or negotiating with Iran is that we have to look for compromises consistent with our national interests.”

Leslie H. Gelb, “Lessons From the Cuban Missile Crisis” (CFR, 10/22)