Previous and recent writings on the Cuban missile crisis call into question the sorts of history that can and should be available for international security policy and analysis. The capacity of history is seriously limited with respect to evaluations of crisis outcomes, prescriptive and cautionary maxims, narrative completeness, and cause-and-effect inferences. Yet history as remembered is a valuable and inherent part of national security thinking. Ways are suggested to treat history to gain more from it. These principles apply at least as much to modern decision technology uses of history as to more traditional approaches.
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