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.
Kennedy and Khrushchev at Vienna Meeting, 06/03/1961 – 06/04/1961. Photograph of President John F. Kennedy and Chairman Nikita Khrushchev during their meeting in Vienna, Austria in 1961, the year before the Cuban Missile Crisis. [JFK Library]