Is Crisis Management Always Possible
After the Cuban missile crisis had been resolved, President John F. Kennedy confessed that the odds of the Soviets going to war seemed to him at the time "somewhere between one out of three and even."' Kennedy's judgment has remained a matter of controversy among scholars and members of the "Ex Com," the informal working group the President assembled to help him manage the crisis. Robert McNamara and McGeorge Bundy contend that it may have been a reasonably accurate estimate of the risks at the time.2 Dean Acheson and Paul Nitze, by contrast, argued that the President greatly exaggerated the prospect of war.3 Even if he did, Kennedy's judgment nevertheless reflects an undisputed political reality: the Cuban missile crisis was, relatively speaking, the closest the superpowers had ever come to nuclear war. It was not an experience that any of the participants looked forward to repeating. Whether by skill or by circumstance, or both, the superpowers have managed to avoid war-threatening confrontations since. There have been crises, to be sure, but none of them of the magnitude of Cuba. Even the 1973 Middle East crisis, the most serious superpower clash after 1962, was by all accounts a faint echo