exchange.
On the American side, there is the extraordinary case of Captain Charles Maultsby, a U-2 pilot who blundered over the Soviet Union at the height of the crisis on 27 October after being sent on a mission to the North Pole to monitor Soviet nuclear tests.
Declassified US documents reveal that Maultsby spent 74 minutes in Soviet air space, causing the Russians to scramble half a dozen Mig fighters in response. The Air Force failed to inform the president of what had happened until half an hour after he left Soviet air space.
On the Russian side, communications were so bad that Khrushchev could only exercise tenuous control over his troops on Cuba. The nuclear missiles aimed at Guantanamo were under the command of a major. There were no locks or codes to prevent them being fired.
Today, there is no longer such a thing as strategy, there is only crisis management
The happy outcome to the crisis - with Khrushchev withdrawing his missiles and no nuclear exchange - engendered a spate of hubris among "the best and the brightest".
McNamara declared: "Today, there is no longer such a thing as strategy, there is only crisis management." McNamara and others attempted to put these lessons into practice in Vietnam, with disastrous results.
Fortunately, Kennedy did not believe his own spin. His own prior experience - both as a US Navy lieutenant in World War II and the Bay of Pigs fiasco in 1961 - had taught him to react sceptically to the assurances of the military brass. He moved decisively to bring the crisis to an end by secretly offering to match a withdrawal of Soviet missiles from Cuba with a dismantling of US Jupiters in Turkey.
JFK understood, better than any of his advisers, that events were spiralling out of control by 27 October, the day that became known as "Black Saturday". He knew that the chances of something going drastically wrong increase exponentially the closer you get to actual fighting. In a war, anything can, and usually does, happen - as we have seen repeatedly in Iraq.
Kennedy knew that crisis management was a myth, and that there is no margin for error in preparing for a nuclear war.
That is the abiding lesson of the Cuban missile crisis.
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