20 Years Later, Specialists Discuss Cuban Missile Crisis

"The Cuban missile crisis remains the best window we have, be it a cloudy one, through which we can contemplate the events that brought us as close as we have ever come to destroying ourselves," Graham T. Allison, dean of the Kennedy School of Government, said last night at a panel discussion on the crisis.

The forum, attended by about 500 people, featured Allison, and McGeorge Bundy '48, who was National Security Adviser during the Kennedy Administration. Richard Neustadt, Professor of Public Policy, moderated the discussion.

Emphasized

Bundy interrupted a viewing of Kennedy's address to the people on October 22, 1962 to underline the fact that Kennedy never considered the alternative of not acting.

In another interruption, Bundy explained that a decisive objection to choosing the air strike alternative, rather than the imposition of a quarantine--the option that was taken--was that there was "nothing surgical about it. In fact, both the patient [Cuba] and doctor [The U.S.] could have died." But quarantine and blockade served a double function, he said. They demonstrated U.S. determination and delayed an immediate Soviet reply.

Allision cited what he called "serapting illusions," including the fact that those was no real chance of a noclear war, that the blookade worked and that a strategic noclear balance was irrelevent.

Allison said that U.S. officials should learn from what he called the "lessons" of the missile crisis. These include the "lesson of deterrence"--that both superpowers would be victims of a nuclear war--and "the lesson of diplomacy," which "leaves open to the opponent an alternative other than war on humiliation" he said.

The extensive negotiations among Kennedy and his top sides were crucial in resolving the crisis, he said. "Today it's very unlikely that this would hold," he added.