The Foreign Service Journal, November 2012

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | NOVEMBER 2012 17 Recalling a Fateful 13 Days T his October, the world observed the 50th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis, an episode that has been the subject of many books (both nonfic- tion and fiction), TV documentaries and films. Yet as David Ignatius comments in th e Oct. 12 Washington Post : “So many of the key questions about the crisis remain unanswered—and perhaps, unanswerable: Why did Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev secretly install nuclear missiles in Cuba? Why did President John F. Kennedy and his brother Bobby resist the nearly univer- sal advice of hawkish advisers to strike Cuba, despite their own decades of mili- tant anti-Soviet rhetoric? What would have happened if detailed news of the crisis had leaked, or if the Soviets had publicized JFK’s secret pledge to remove missiles from Turkey in exchange for Khrushchev’s public climb-down?” To mark the occasion, several think- tanks and other organizations are spon- soring symposiums to seek the elusive answers to such questions. Ignatius devotes much of his column to one such gathering, held at th e Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center. Hosted by Graham Allison, whose book Essence of Decision (published in 1971, then reissued with new material in 1999) makes him the dean of scholars of the crisis, that forum has unearthed some disquieting nuggets of infor- mation: Some Soviet ships may have turned around two days earlier than U.S. intelligence realized; and as JFK’s inner circle of advisers (known as “ExComm”) planned an invasion, they didn’t realize the Soviets had already deployed tactical nuclear weapons there. As Ignatius comments, “It’s truly frightening how much wasn’t under- stood at the time.” The Belfer Center has also create d a Web site t o mark the 50th anniversary of the crisis, offering background informa- tion, resources for students and teachers, and much more. With For- eign Policy magazine, the center also co- sponsored a contest for the best original 300-word submission on lessons that leaders can learn from the crisis. The Center for International Policy held an Oct. 25 conference that exam- ined “The Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962: Its Aftermath and Its Implications Then and Now.” Retired Foreign Service offi- cers Wayne Smith and Harry C. Blaney, both senior fellows at CIP, were among the featured participants. For its part, on Oct. 15 the Woodrow Wilson Center held a “National Conver- sation,” m oderated by National Public Radio correspondent Tom Gjelten, to explore the question, “Is the World More Dangerous 50 Years after the Cuban Mis- sile Crisis?” Speakers included Wilson Center Director Jane Harman; Gra- ham Allison; Timothy Naftali, a senior research fellow at the New America Foundation; and former Washington Post reporter Michael Dobbs. The live webcast is available both on the NPR and Wilson Center sites. Dobbs, incidentally, has a fascinat- in g blog o n the Foreign Policy magazine Web site called “On the Brink: The Cuban Missile Crisis +50.” All Hail Mighty Grenada! T he United States, China, the United Kingdom and Russia led the rest of the world in total number of medals won at the 2012 London Summer Olympics. But as Aaron Bycoffe, Jay Boice and Andrei Scheinkman point out on the Huffington Post , ranking nations by total medals earned isn’t necessarily the best way to judge relative success. After all, some countries have a lot more people, or a lot more money, than others. For instance, America sent 530 athletes to the London Games, whereas Somalia had just two people representing it. With that in mind, the three analysts have put together interactive maps that sift the medal counts according to each country’s population, and gross domestic product, respectively. (They weight the results so that a gold medal is worth three points; a silver, two; and a bronze, one.) Looked at in terms of population base and economic clout, the four biggest winners all hail from the Caribbean: Grenada (which brought home a gold medal with a population of just 109,011 and a GDP of $1.89 billion), the Bahamas, Jamaica and Trinidad & Tobago. Th e Guardian sports section e mploys a similar methodology (explained in painstaking detail), but goes an additional step by ranking competitors in terms of team size. The newspaper identifies the top four nations in that category as China, Jamaica, Iran and Botswana. —This month’s edition of Talking Points was compiled by Editor Steven Alan Honley. n