Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
I’m going to be provocative. I’m going to sum some things up
so get ready- velcro your butts to your chairs out there, professors.
Here comes another professor with a bone to pick.
I don’t think you’re getting it yet.
I’ve been at this now for over 25 years.
Our findings are unequivocal, but you’re not listening.
You’re trapped in your old ways of thinking, which I would put it this way-
you’re all realists, at least that what you call yourselves, realists.
It means the reason the Cuban Missile Crisis came out the way that it did,
that is to say with the Russians pulling the missiles out of Cuba,
and the Americans declaring victory (“victory” in quotes I’ll put it),
Russians go home, Kennedy is a hero…
You say that the reason that happened is that
the Americans had a 17 to 1 lead in deliverable nuclear weapons.
Second reason is obviously the U.S. has super superiority in the Caribbean
and that’s where we live.
There’s no way they can compete.
So they’re way behind in nuclear weapons,
they’re way behind in conventional warfare capability in the region where the event actually occurred.
Game over, end of conversation, end of story, Russians go home.
Stupid Russians, they shouldn’t have tried it.
Now a corollary of this is that it wasn’t all that dangerous anyway...
Khrushchev will only take it so far.
He’s not an idiot. He'll only take it so far, and then he’ll leave.
People who understand the Missile Crisis understand it pretty much the way I think they understand
the Second World War, The Napoleonic Wars, or the Peloponnesian Wars.
It’s all about numbers.
It’s stuff you can count, stuff you can weigh, stuff you can sort of touch:
bullets, tanks, positions, airplanes, bombs, ships… that stuff.
Move it around, you count it up.
If the balance of power, the holy concept, the balance of power is one way or the other,
that’s the determining factor.
I’ll start with Kennedy.
You don’t understand anything about Kennedy’s motivation,
for Kennedy was deathly afraid of getting into a war.
Now, you say, well, maybe he did maybe he didn’t, I mean that’s ridiculous.
Why would anybody be afraid of getting into a war when he’s got that kind of an advantage?
That is old thinking
because John F. Kennedy is the first President to actually understand that nuclear weapons are not weapons.
Nuclear weapons together- Russian and American
nuclear weapons is a doomsday machine.
One goes off, five go off, a thousand go off, ten thousand go off, end of world.
That’s what was going on in his brain.
Lo and behold that’s what was going on in Khrushchev’s brain.
Listening to people talk about their deepest fears, their deepest thoughts during the Missile Crisis,
and I mean the leadership, I’m talking about the Cubans, the Russians, and the Americans-
we’ve talked to them all-
all of them on the U.S. side from your point of view should have been confident.
They were at least AS afraid of what might happen as Khrushchev was.
And in fact, it’s only because of that that we began looking elsewhere in our research paradigm.
Instead of looking outside at numbers,
at 17 to 1, and conventional deployments,
we looked in.
We needed a new way to think about this.
“What were you feeling? What were you afraid of?”
And then we went to the Russians and asked, “What were you afraid of?”
Guess what… They were afraid of the same thing, exactly the same thing.
What was it?
The fear of things getting out of control.
The fear of things getting out of control
and somewhere, somehow, the fuse will be lit and we won’t be able to put it out,
and with that degree of power, of nuclear power, the whole world would blow up.
You only get that, though, if you talk to people, if you listen to people,
and the way that we talk about it is you have to empathize with the adversary.
Am I really in the shoes of the other?
This, I think, colleagues, this is why the Missile Crisis ended when it did and the way that it did.
Kennedy and Khrushchev at the last minute looked in the mirror and they saw each other:
“You feel like I do, right?”…
"Yes." The correspondence back and forth was,
“it’s going to get out of control. Let’s stop it right now.”
Now the fly in the ointment here is Fidel Castro in Cuba
because Kennedy thinks Khrushchev has got him under control,
and Khrushchev thinks he’s got Fidel under control, but he didn’t.
Fidel was a loose cannon.
There are reasons for that, but the point is
they almost got into each other’s shoes a wee bit late.
24 hours… they may have had 48 hours to go.
Of course troops matter and warheads matter, and numbers matter.
Of course they do.
But in a crisis, what really matters is:
Do I think I understand the story that the other guy is telling himself?
What is that story?
And, is that related to the story I’m telling myself?
Now put that in your old yellow notes and
use that at the top of your next lecture on the Cuban Missile Crisis…
and good luck.