Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center has created this site as a resource for the Cuban Missile Crisis. Designed to help policymakers, students, and interested citizens draw lessons from these critical events half a century ago, this site not only provides background on the crisis that brought the world to the brink of nuclear disaster in October 1962 but also offers tools to understand how it can inform contemporary policy.
October 23, 1962. Aerial Photograph of Intercontinental Range Ballistic Missile Launch Site Number One at Guanajay, Cuba. [ARC Identifier 193934. Item from Collection JFK-PXDOD: United States Department of Defense, 1961 – 1963] National Archives, Unrestricted Use.