Fidel Castro and the Cubans were far from insane and far from suicidal. They were rational, given that they had concluded that Cuba’s destruction was inevitable (an impression that the Americans were trying to convey, but without sufficiently thinking through the implications of such a strategy). If Castro had been crazy, the only lesson would be the common-sense injunction—easy to state, less easy to implement—to try to keep crazy people from becoming leaders of countries. But in October 1962, rational leaders, making decisions each believed were in his country’s interests, unwittingly went sleepwalking together toward the nuclear abyss, dragging the whole world with them. The Cuban missile crisis is scary and relevant today not because Castro was crazy, but because he wasn’t! Something like it could happen again, in our 21st-century world, with its nearly 15,000 nuclear weapons. That’s the truth. You are here today because three leaders, and the rest of the human race, got lucky in October 1962. Ask yourself how it feels to consider that the planet you inhabit today was saved from total destruction in October 1962 principally by luck. Let the idea sink in. Will you bet we’ll get that lucky next time?
Don’t. For more than half a century, we’ve been told that the crisis was a great victory because the Russians blinked and the Americans didn’t (while the Cubans didn’t matter at all). We avoided Armageddon in October 1962, and we’ll avoid it next time. Both parts of that proposition are bullshit. The next time the world finds itself staring into the nuclear abyss, and war breaks out, the lucky ones will likely be those who die quickly. The living will envy the dead.