Reflections on the Cuban missile crisis, 50 years on


Some of Kennedy’s advisers urged an airstrike and invasion to destroy the missiles. Kennedy mobilized troops, but also bought time by announcing a naval blockade of Cuba. The crisis subsided when Soviet ships carrying additional missiles turned back and Khrushchev agreed to remove the existing missiles from the island. As then U.S. Secretary of State Dean Rusk put it: “We were eyeball to eyeball, and I think the other fellow just blinked.”






Nonetheless, there are still ambiguities about the missile crisis that make it difficult to attribute the outcome entirely to the nuclear component. The public consensus was that the U.S. won. But how much the U.S. won, and why it won, is hard to determine.

There are at least two possible explanations of the outcome, in addition to Soviet acquiescence to America’s superior nuclear firepower. One focuses on the importance of the two superpowers’ relative stakes in the crisis: The U.S. not only had a greater stake in neighboring Cuba than the Soviets did, but could also bring conventional forces to bear. The naval blockade and the possibility of a U.S. invasion strengthened the credibility of American deterrence, placing the psychological burden on the Soviets.

The other explanation questions the very premise that the Cuban missile crisis was an outright U.S. victory. The Americans had three options: a “shootout” (bomb the missile sites); a “squeeze out” (blockade Cuba to convince the Soviets to withdraw the missiles); and a “buyout” (give the Soviets something they want).

For a long time, the participants said little about the buyout aspects of the solution. But subsequent evidence suggests that a quiet U.S. promise to remove its obsolete missiles from Turkey and Italy was probably more important than was thought at the time (the U.S. also gave a public assurance that it would not invade Cuba).


How real were these risks? On Oct. 27, 1962, just after Soviet forces in Cuba shot down a U.S. surveillance plane (killing the pilot), a similar plane taking routine air samples near Alaska inadvertently violated Soviet airspace in Siberia. Fortunately, it was not shot down. But even more serious, unbeknownst to the Americans, Soviet forces in Cuba had been instructed to repel a U.S. invasion, and had been authorized to use their tactical nuclear weapons to do so.


Joseph S. Nye, a former U.S. assistant secretary of defense and chairman of the U.S. National Intelligence Council, is university professor at Harvard University. His most recent book is “The Future of Power.” THE DAILY STAR publishes this commentary in collaboration with Project Syndicate © (





Your feedback is important to us!




comments powered by Disqus



Interested in knowing more about this story?

Click here