Although climate change, deforestation and depletion of ground water are all serious threats to sustainable development, the biggest threat to future well-being remains the specter of war. The world was at the brink of nuclear conflict during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, and could quickly find itself there again in South Asia, the Middle East, the Korean Peninsula or some other hotspot. The Cuban crisis was transformed, through President John F. Kennedy's political vision and dexterity, into the beginning of arms control in the 1963 Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. That historic breakthrough offers timely lessons for today.

The unprecedented events of late 1962 through mid-1963 are well known. Soviet leader Nikita Krushchev gambled by trying to position offensive surface-to-ground nuclear missiles in Cuba, cheating on promises to limit their Cuban arsenal to defensive weapons. The U.S. caught the Soviets in mid-course of installing the missiles and imposed a naval quarantine. The Soviets agreed to withdraw the offensive missiles in return for a U.S. commitment not to invade Cuba and a secret pledge to remove nuclear missiles from Turkey at a later date. After coming within hours of war, the U.S. and Soviet Union went on a few months later to sign a test ban agreement.

Even in retrospect the outcome seems a bit of legerdemain. How does one go from the brink of war to a breakthrough peace treaty in under a year? Kennedy's methodological starting point was to avoid vilifying the Soviet Union, or declaring the adversary to be evil or beyond rationality. At every step, Kennedy assumed that Soviet counterparts were rational, though not necessarily beyond mistakes in their chosen actions. He assumed that the Soviet Union would seek tactical advantages where it could get them but would pull back from self-annihilation.

Read more