This is the mobile-friendly web version of the original article.
The Cuban Missile Crisis – Miscalculation - Nuclear Risks and the Human Dimension
The US Army War College Quarterly: Parameters
Volume 52, Number 3 Autumn Issue, Article 11
8-25-2022
Arthur I. Cyr
Video: The history of the Cuban Missile Crisis - Matthew A. Jordan
Recommended Citation Arthur I. Cyr, “The Cuban Missile Crisis: Miscalculation, Nuclear Risks, and the Human Dimension,” Parameters 52, no. 3 (2022), doi:10.55540/0031-1723.3173.
This Article is brought to you for free and open access by USAWC Press. It has been accepted for inclusion in The US Army War College Quarterly: Parameters by an authorized editor of USAWC Press.
ABSTRACT: Nuclear weapons have vastly raised the stakes and potential costs of crisis, making leadership and related human qualities of judgment and temperament crucial. This article analyzes in depth one exceptionally dangerous US-Soviet confrontation, which barely averted war. Military and policy professionals will see how understanding the perspectives, incentives, and limitations of opponents is important in every conflict—and vital when facing crisis situations like nuclear war.
Keywords:
Cuba, deterrence, leadership, missile crisis, nuclear weapons
The Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962 between the Soviet Union, the United States, and Cuba remains the closest the world has come to nuclear war. The enormously high stakes involved and the fact the two superpowers barely averted nuclear war provided powerful incentives to avoid another such confrontation. However, there has been the potential for nuclear war since then. During the 1973 Arab-Israeli Yom Kippur War, US President Richard Nixon ordered a worldwide strategic alert of American military forces, and Israel may have readied nuclear weapons. In 1983, Moscow misinterpreted the annual Able Archer military exercise conducted by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) as preparation for an attack. Professor John Lewis Gaddis of Yale University described this event as “probably the most dangerous moment since the Cuban Missile Crisis.”1
The Cuban Missile Crisis remains distinct for the closeness of nuclear weapons to the United States; the proximity of American and Soviet warships (particularly nuclear-armed submarines) to one another; and the public unfolding of the crisis following US President John F. Kennedy’s speech of October 22, 1962, which began the public turmoil, though vital crisis resolution occurred privately. Nearly 60 years later, the Cuban Missile Crisis reminds the international community of how nuclear weapons raise the stakes and potential costs of any crisis. It is a regular topic for quantitative and
1. McGeorge Bundy, Danger and Survival: Choices about the Bomb in the First Fifty Years (New York: Random House, 1988), 518–25 (Israel nuclear weapons), 585; and John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War – A New History (New York: Penguin Press, 2005), 227–28. Excellent background information on the Yom Kippur War is provided by the Cold War Archives at George Washington University, https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB98/index.htm.
theoretical policy analysis, in particular game theory. While these approaches can aid crisis analysis, they can also distort reality and encourage false confidence.2 Unlike theory, the reality of a crisis is that events can quickly become unpredictable, and strong leadership becomes crucial to a successful resolution.