- “A bewildering array of hypotheses has attempted to explain Soviet policy in the Cuban Missile
Crisis. Remarkably, practically all of these explanations start with the premise that Khruschev behaved rationally… the assumption of rationality… simply cannot be reconciled with Khrushchev’s policy… an alternative explanation should show why and how Khrushchev convinced himself in the face of all the indications to the contrary that he could successfully put Soviet missiles into Cuba… [“Brinkmanship”] crises could most readily be traced to grave foreign and domestic threats that leaders believed could only be overcome through an aggressive foreign policy. The most important external threat was the expectation of a dramatic shift in the balance of power… a multiplicity of motives on the part of the initiator… Graham Allison has suggested that the missiles could have been perceived as the solution to a number of different problems confronted by influential groups within the Soviet hierarchy. ”
Lesson: Assumption of rationality cannot be reconciled with Khrushchev’s policy. There were various motives for his “brinkmanship”: the deployment of missiles was seen as a solution to different problems by Soviet elites.
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- “One of the first serious analyses of the Cuban Missile Crisis was Albert and Roberta Wohlstetter’s Controlling the Risks in Cuba, published in 1965…The real problem, the Wohlstetters insisted, was that “each side in short tended to project its own psychology or certain stereotypes about the behavior of the other.” The review of the literature here suggests that this is even truer of the analysts; their interpretations of the crisis tell us at least as much about themselves as they do about Khrushchev and Kennedy. The Cuban Missile Crisis might be likened to a Rorschach test: the ink blots that constitute the few facts reveal little that is conclusive about Soviet policymaking, but the responses of political scientists to them say a lot about their anxiety concerning nuclear war. Unfortunately, the attempt by the analysts to deny the strong strain of irrationality that runs through even the most momentous policy decisions will not make such a war any less likely.”
Lesson: Each side projected its own psychology and stereotypes about the behavior of the other and analysts did the same. Analysts of the Missile Crisis have tried to deny the strong strain of irrationality in decision making.
Richard Ned Lebow, “The Cuban Missile Crisis: Reading the Lessons Correctly”, Political Science Quarterly, vol. 98, no. 3 (1983): 431-458.
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- “As far as the outcome is concerned, I agree in retrospect that we were lucky and the Missile Crisis lowered the long-run risks of nuclear war. But its damaging effects included Vietnam, where wrongly applied lessons had a disastrous outcome, as well as a long and sustained Soviet buildup.” (p. 106)
Lesson: The crisis lowered the long-run risks of nuclear war, but its lessons were wrongly applied in Vietnam.
Cited in James G. Blight and David Welch, On the Brink: Americans and Soviets reexamine the Cuban Missile Crisis (New York: Hill and Wang, 1989).
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