Cuban Missile Crisis
Authors: Weaver Michael E. 
Published: February 2023

Works on the Cuban Missile Crisis generally pursue one of two objectives: conveying events with the greatest accuracy and using the crisis to examine or illustrate a related issue. Works written before the mid-1980s suffer from an absence of important primary sources. The release of American and Soviet sources has made substantiating arguments easier, has overturned a couple of tropes, and has introduced new and startling information. Major topics and questions include why the Soviets installed ballistic missiles in Cuba, the Kennedy administration’s strategy for forcing their removal, reasons the Soviets removed the missiles, assessments of individuals, the extent to which the crisis could have escalated into general nuclear war, the roles of allied states such as Cuba and the United Kingdom, gaps between political actors’ perceptions and the reality of what was actually taking place, and key moments and actions. Among the greatest revelations resulting from the expansion of available sources was the Soviet installation of dozens of short-range nuclear rockets and cruise missiles for incinerating an American seaborne invasion force. The Americans were unaware of these weapons in 1962. One Soviet submarine commander considered using a nuclear-tipped torpedo against US Navy warships that were hounding the submarine. While American forces, nuclear and conventional, were at a very high state of alert, operational plans for attacking the missile sites relied solely on conventional weaponry. Attorney General Robert Kennedy favored military action; it was Secretary of State Dean Rusk who first made comparisons between American military options and the attack on Pearl Harbor. The Soviets put the ballistic missiles in Cuba primarily to deter an American invasion; reconfiguring the nuclear balance in favor of the Soviet Union was a secondary goal. Ambassador to the United Nations Adlai Stevenson was no appeaser. Cuban president Fidel Castro encouraged Premier Nikita Khrushchev to initiate a war against the United States. Termination of the crisis began when President John F. Kennedy promised to not invade Cuba and also to remove the sixteen Jupiter intermediate-range ballistic missiles the United States still had in Turkey, as long as the Soviets successfully kept the promise of a missile swap an absolute secret. Administration officials insisted this never took place. Understanding of the events during the crisis is good, but new revelations from the Soviet Union and Cuba leave room for additional synthetic works. Since 1962 three kinds of scholars have produced most of the literature: presidential historians, historians of foreign relations, and political scientists. The first group set the narrative, and the central question has been “How well did John F. Kennedy respond to the crisis?” Students of the crisis should be aware that the initial examinations celebrated Kennedy and had almost no access to historical records. Indeed, Kennedy’s friends wrote the first histories. Presidential biographers have become more nuanced and balanced as records have been declassified. Political scientists have made great contributions by assessing questions beyond what happened and why. Starting with Graham Allison, these scholars have attempted to wrest practical lessons for policymakers. Scholars of diplomatic history have written at the pace at which archives have opened and adjusted to the revelations that American, Soviet, and Cuban sources have made. Later scholars have attempted to raise the visibility of participants other than the elites in the United States and the Soviet Union. Scholars of the history of war and warfare soon find only a history of the mobilization of military forces; approaches from diplomatic history and international relations produce fruit that is more well developed. (The views in this bibliography are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy of the US government, the Department of Defense, or Air University.)