THIRTEEN DAYS

March 2001
		Nearly 10 years after the end of the Cold War, are nuclear weapons still a threat? What can be learned from the dramatic events of the Cuban Missile Crisis? Former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara responds to your questions.

Forum introduction What was the makeup of President Kennedy's inner circle? How much did news reporters know and relay about the events of the crisis? Was Kenneth O'Donnell as big a part of the real events as he is in the movie? Didn't the U.S. remove missiles in Turkey in exchange for moving Soviet missiles out of Cuba? Didn't the Bay of Pigs invasion help stir Cuban resentment? How much did the government learn about the crisis after it was over? How would today's military react to a similar crisis?     Online Special Media Watch Feb. 22, 2001 Three experts discuss the new movie "Thirteen Days." Online Special: Coverage of the Missile Defense Debate

Ed O’Brien of Metuchen, New Jersey asks: How do you think today’s military would react to a similar crisis? Would military leaders now pause to a greater extent than they did in 1962? Robert McNamara responds: Well, I hope so. I would hope that we all learned a lesson from the 1962 experience and particularly the retrospective reviews which have gone on. As I say, I participated in five of those meetings over a period of I think it was seven years, and transcripts of those have all been published. And there’s been much, much discussion of the missile crisis in the intervening years. And I think the major lesson is that military operations are so complex it’s beyond the capability of the human mind to avoid mistakes, and any individual who’s held a senior position, in military command, uniform or as a senior civilian in the Defense Department, knows that in war you make decisions that are mistakes and they’re based on misinformation, miscalculation, misjudgment. It’s impossible to avoid that because of the complexity of military operations – the inability of the human mind to encompass all of the variables. So we all make mistakes if we’re in positions of command, and in conventional war they kill people, thousands, maybe tens of thousands, but they don’t destroy nations, because we – the conventional wisdom is don’t make the same mistake twice; learn from your mistakes. And maybe we’re going to make it twice or three times, but we don’t make it four times. There is a learning period. In nuclear war there will be no learning period and, therefore, the indefinite combination of human fallibility and nuclear weapons is going to destroy nations, and the conclusion to that is we must ultimately move to eliminate nuclear weapons. But, in a crisis I think the experience of the Cuban Missile Crisis would cause both military and civilian security advisers to apprise it, to be much, much more cautious, much, much more careful than many were during the 13-day period of the Cuban Missile Crisis. That would be my expectation. It’s both my hope and my belief.