NUCLEAR RISKSSixty Years After the Cuban Missile Crisis, Nuclear Threat Feels Chillingly Immediate
Graham Allison, author of Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis, talks about how Kennedy and Khrushchev stepped back from brink, and says that Western leaders are worried that Putin might not.
Sixty years ago, the U.S. and the Soviet Union faced off over Soviet missiles in Cuba, a stare-down that brought the world to the brink of nuclear conflict. Today, Russian President Vladimir Putin, having unleashed war in Ukraine, repeatedly reminds the West of his country’s nuclear capabilities, reviving the existential tension of October 1962.
Graham Allison, Douglas Dillon Professor of Government at the Kennedy School, has written extensively about the Cuban Missile Crisis. As assistant secretary of defense in the first Clinton administration, he received the Defense Medal for Distinguished Public Service for “reshaping relations with Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan to reduce the former Soviet nuclear arsenal.”
In a conversation with the Gazette, Allison discussed lessons of the John F. Kennedy-Nikita Khrushchev standoff, hard decisions facing President Biden, and the prospect of a cornered Putin. The interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Alvin Powell: Is this the most serious faceoff between nuclear powers since 1962?
Graham Allison: The good news is this is not yet the Cuban Missile Crisis, where JFK believed that the risks of a nuclear war were greater than one in three, an assessment with which I agree. But it’s the closest the U.S. and the Soviet Union-Russia have come to using a nuclear weapon against each other in six decades.
Powell: The U.S. and NATO want to support Ukraine against Putin without triggering nuclear war. It’s a delicate balance. How can they pull it off?
Allison:It’s extremely challenging. Kennedy and Khrushchev, during the 13 days of the Missile Crisis, were facing a real possibility of a nuclear war that would have killed hundreds of millions of people. As they began to peer over the brink, each became determined to consider off-ramps before they got there. If you listen to the tapes of the EXCOMM [Executive Committee of the National Security Council] meetings on Saturday, Oct. 27 — when they get to the end of the day, they can’t figure out what to do. They’re exhausted. There are strong disagreements. When they broke for dinner at 8 o’clock, McNamara says he went home thinking, “Well, this may be my last night.” So they were really, really feeling existential nuclear danger. In those conditions, both Kennedy and Khrushchev became more imaginative and bolder than they had been previously.
