ABSTRACT
The story about “the missiles of October” is so notoriously well known that it almost does not need retelling. Leading Cold War historian John Lewis Gaddis is not the only one to observe that “no episode in the history of international relations has received such microscopic scrutiny from so many historians” and that “theorists have generalized exuberantly from this single specific event.”1 Possibly there is not much new to say about the Cuban Missile Crisis. It may be bad for an ambitious historian trying to tell something new. But it certainly is good for a student of deterrence. With the abundance of scholarship on the Cuban Missile Crisis and on the role nuclear deterrence played in the course of events, this is probably the closest to Archimedes’ “place to stand” students of deterrence can currently get. And it certainly is a useful case for comparison.
