Lessons from the Cuban missile crisis

Ratio of nuclear weapons did not matter as much as the fear of the devastation they could wreak

Image Credit: AFP PHOTO
Cuban leader Fidel Castro gives a speech in Cuba circa October 22, 1962 during the Cold War Cuban Missile Crisis. Fifty years after the Cuban missile crisis, Havana remains virulently hostile to the United States, which reciprocates by maintaining a crippling economic embargo against the communist-ruled Caribbean island.
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Some of Kennedy’s advisers urged an air strike and invasion to destroy the missiles. Kennedy mobilised 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 US Secretary of State Dean Rusk put it: “We were eyeball to eyeball, and I think the other fellow just blinked.”

At first glance, this was a rational and predictable outcome. The US had a 17-to-1 advantage in nuclear weaponry. The Soviets were simply outgunned.


In 1987, I was part of a group of scholars that met at Harvard University with Kennedy’s surviving advisers to study the crisis. Robert McNamara, Kennedy’s secretary of defence, said he became more cautious as the crisis unfolded. At the time, he thought that the probability of nuclear war resulting from the crisis might have been one in 50 (though he rated the risk much higher after he learned in the 1990’s that the Soviets had already delivered nuclear weapons to Cuba).



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 US won. But how much the US 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 US not only had a greater stake in neighbouring Cuba than the Soviets did, but could also bring conventional forces to bear. The naval blockade and the possibility of a US 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 US victory. The Americans had three options: a ‘shoot-out’ (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).


We can conclude that nuclear deterrence mattered in the crisis, and that the nuclear dimension certainly figured in Kennedy’s thinking. But it was not the ratio of nuclear weapons that mattered so much as the fear that even a few nuclear weapons would wreak intolerable devastation.


It is hard to imagine that such a nuclear attack would have remained merely tactical. Kenneth Waltz, an American scholar, recently published an article entitled “Why Iran Should Get the Bomb.” In a rational, predictable world, such an outcome might produce stability. In the real world, the Cuban missile crisis suggests that it might not. As McNamara put it, “We lucked out.”

— Project Syndicate, 2012

Joseph S. Nye, a professor at Harvard, is the author of The Future of Power.