President John F. Kennedy announcing the U.S. naval blockade of Cuba on October 22, 1962. [Encyclopedia Britannica, © Archive Photos]
JFK Announces Blockade
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.