Facing Nuclear War: Luck, Learning, and the Cuban Missile Crisis

The possibility of thermonuclear war has in many ways shaped the agendas of History and International Relations. Rigorous counterfactual analysis effectively demonstrates that the risks of unintended and runaway escalation were higher than generally assumed. Nuclear war planning and proposals for arms control and disarmament are based on imagined future scenarios. Current thinking about the future rarely goes beyond extrapolation. Counterfactual analysis provides a more sophisticated foundation for forward looking narratives in contrast to the usual extrapolation of present trends.

In: The Oxford Handbook of History and International Relations (Oxford University Press, 2023), edited by Mlada Bukovansky, Edward Keene, Christian Reus-Smit, and Maja Spanu.