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.

Michael Peck

[Cuban Missile Crisis]: “a goodie bag from which politicians and policy-makers grab whatever lesson they need at the moment.”

Lesson: Avoid cherry-picking lessons just in order to justify current policy decisions.

Michael Peck, “The Cuban Missile Crisis: What Would JFK Say About Obama, Romney?” (Forbes, 10/25/12)