ABSTRACT
It has quite properly been said that the Cuban missile crisis stands as a watershed of the Cold War and in the history of the contemporary international system. Not unexpectedly, the effects of this watershed on Cuban affairs have been submerged in a larger context of American-Soviet relations. One would have to start from the premise that this mutuality of perceived assets permitted a pacific settlement of the crisis to take place. Given the general context of the political situation of the defense establishment, it is important to reexamine the Cuban missile crisis in its specifics. The services and the Defense Department expressed different strategic interpretations of the Cuban crisis in the congressional appropriations hearing of 1965. The Air Force interpreted limited war and limited "aggression" as capable of being deterred by strategic nuclear forces and the credibility of its threatened use, while the army viewed strategic nuclear forces alone as insufficient.
