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The Belfer Center’s Project on Managing the Atom, Intelligence Project, and Applied History Project organized a day-long conference in October to mark the 60th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis and to discuss what we’ve learned from the CMC. Managing the Atom’s Mariana Budjeryn discusses the relevance of those lessons for today’s conflict in Ukraine.

Nathaniel L. Moir argues that the Russian invasion of Ukraine in early 2022 evokes a failure to learn the many lessons Bernard Fall sought to convey in critiquing American operations in Vietnam in the 1960s and as France sought to control Indochina in the 1950s. Among his contributions was Fall's demand that policy-makers recognize the primacy of political legitimacy over military force. 

If you woke up to news of a massive cyber or Pearl Harbor-type attack on the U.S., you would want to know that a solid national security structure and plan was in place. On May 11, the Intelligence Project and Applied History Project hosted a conference to imagine a new National Security Act to replace the current act of 1947.

In late January, at the peak of America’s COVID-19 outbreak, and nearly two months after the first vaccine was approved, Graham Allison and research assistant Hugo Yen found that hundreds of thousands of vaccine doses were being left unused on shelves due to sluggish rollouts by state governments....By simplifying the array of vaccination statistics provided by the CDC into clear metrics, Allison and Yen developed a COVID-19 Vaccine Report Card to help citizens easily understand their states’ performance in the vaccine rollout and better hold their state governments accountable. 

In addition to hosting a speakers series with renowned historians and scholars discussing lessons from history that are applicable to today's challenges, the Applied History Project is pleased to support an essay contest asking for history-informed essays on "How to Reunite America." 

We asked Fredrik Logevall, author of JFK: Coming of Age in the American Century (Random House, 2020), why he decided to write a biography of John F. Kennedy, what surprised him in his research, and whether he thinks Kennedy would have won the 2020 presidential election.

Brief news and information on recent activities, special events, and recognitions at the Belfer Center.

In this issue, we highlight five new books by Belfer Center members.

Since publishing his book, Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap?, three years ago, Harvard Kennedy School Professor Graham Allison has been searching for ways to escape the dangerous dynamic that could lead Washington and Beijing to stumble into a catastrophic conflict neither side wants. Convinced that there is no monopoly of strategic wisdom on either side of the Pacific, Allison decided to take a classroom assignment on crafting a grand strategy to meet the China challenge and open it to the public as a case competition. His office received dozens of valuable submissions from across the world.

The Belfer Center was honored to host former Secretary of Defense James Mattis this fall for an afternoon of conversations related to applied history and statesmanship.