This research paper analyzes at different levels the origins, management and resolution, and consequences of the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962. A careful study of all the material on that crisis which is now available suggests that no single level of analysis is adequate to explain the crisis. The thesis of this paper is: (1) while the immediate cause of the crisis was the Soviet decision to deploy secretly in Cuba medium range and intermediate range ballistic missiles (MRBMs and IRBMs, respectively), which produced a dangerous confrontation between the world's nuclear superpowers, misconceptions, misunderstandings and mistakes by both sides helped bring about the crisis and magnified its intensity; (2) although responsible statesmanship on both sides enabled them eventually to resolve the crisis short of war, actions each took during the crisis generated pressures and an escalatory dynamic which helped generate tensions which brought the world close to brink of nuclear conflict; and (3) even though war was avoided, the consequences of the crisis were mixed, and were neither as obvious nor as salutory as at first appeared to be the case.
Conventional accounts in the United States at the time of the crisis and thereafter viewed the Soviet decision to place MRBMs and IRBMs in Cuba as an unprovoked act of Soviet aggression and in the Soviet Union as a legitimate effort by the Russians to defend the communist regime of Cuba which was under threat of American attack. The Soviet decision, which was made by Chairman Nikita Khrushchev after consultation with some of his closest associates in the Politburo in April-May 1962, appears to have been based on a mixture of motivations and fundamental Soviet misconceptions concerning the likely American reaction.
During the first two years after Fidel Castro's 26th of July movement took power in Havana, Khrushchev provided only limited assistance to Cuba, partly because he had doubts...