Should We Stop Studying the Cuban Missile Crisis?

The Cuban missile crisis remains one of the most intensely studied events of the twentieth century, and which engages the attention of scholars from a variety of disciplines. Lessons learned by American practitioners and academics contributed to the conduct of American foreign policy in the 1960s and to academic understanding of nuclear deterrence, nuclear crises and crisis management in general. Nearly fifty years of scholarship have generated new insights and understanding as. From the 1980s, study of what in Moscow was termed the Caribbean crisis, was informed by access to Soviet officials and Soviet archives, and became the forefront of the ‘new historiography’ of the Cold War. This collection reviews how various texts inform our understanding and how new interpretations and/or new sources of information have overtaken (or indeed validated) the original analysis. This article provides an overview of this endeavour and an answer to the question of whether we should continue to study the Cuban missile crisis.