Most accounts of the Cuban missile crisis revolve around the decisions that Kennedy got right in response to Soviet provocations. The 2000 film Thirteen Days is a prominent example, depicting an alarmed but steady commander in chief being pressured by his military brass to use force. The film shows Kennedy, in close consultation with his brother, pushing back against the hollow certainties of gung-ho military advisers—a lesson, it is often said, he had drawn from The Guns of August. But Plokhy is more interested in the “ideological hubris and overriding political agendas” that the missile crisis laid bare, along with demonstrations of “poor judgment often due to the lack of good intelligence, and cultural misunderstandings.”
The successful resolution to the crisis meant that Kennedy and Khrushchev alike could claim to have prevailed. Kennedy, of course, had forced the USSR to stand down. The president’s ecstatic advisers pushed him to use his renewed standing on the world stage to press for foreign policy breakthroughs in other areas. When the president demurred, Ted Sorensen complained: “But Mr. President, today you’re more than ten feet tall.” Kennedy chuckled and replied, “That will last about a couple of weeks.” For his part, Khrushchev insisted he had come out on top, securing a commitment that the U.S. would not invade Cuba and demonstrating to the world how to avoid nuclear war (never mind his role in almost bringing it about).
The Cuban missile crisis illustrated the very real danger of nuclear war, instilling a sobriety in policymakers on both sides of the Iron Curtain. It marked a shift in attitudes that would mostly endure for the rest of the Cold War. Just two years earlier, in 1960, RAND Corporation futurist Herman Kahn had been shockingly cavalier in his technical treatise On Thermonuclear War, arguing that nuclear war was, for the U.S., perfectly winnable. “Will the survivors envy the dead?” Not necessarily, he argued. He did not believe that such a conflict would inevitably end human civilization. As for the health effects of nuclear fallout, he coldly posited that “the high risk of an additional one percent of our children being born deformed” might be acceptable “if that meant not giving up Europe to Soviet Russia.” For Kahn, deterrence would only work if the U.S. communicated a genuine willingness to engage in nuclear war; that, he argued, was the only way to ensure the Soviets never called Washington’s bluff.