REMEMBERING THE CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS.

REMEMBERING THE CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS. My friend Sandy Levinson has a reminiscence about the Cuban Missile Crisis on the Balkinization web site. Sandy recalls that he was a graduate student at Harvard preparing to become a “defense intellectual”. He remembers that he was “remarkably detached” during the Crisis because: “As a would-be ‘defense intellectual,’ up on my game theory, I ‘knew’ that it was utterly irrational for the Soviet Union and the United States to engage in armed conflict that could easily lead to nuclear exchanges and World War III. Therefore it wouldn’t (and, of course, didn’t happen).” Sandy posts out in the rest of the post that the historical record shows that there was in fact a substantial chance of nuclear war during the Crisis.
Coincidentally, I was reminiscing about the Cuban Missile Crisis with my brother Elmer about a week ago. We were graduate students in economics at Harvard at the time, and we remarked in our phone call that we had paid no attention to the Crisis. We also remembered that most other graduate students seemed to pay it no attention. Television sets were rare at the time, and the black and white sets in the dormitory TV rooms were pretty much deserted. We remembered though that there were a handful of students who sat watching the news hour after hour and that these were the graduate students with military backgrounds or who were on leave from the Department of Defense. They knew what was at stake, but at the time I thought they had simply a professional interest in the events.