This month humanity will mark the 60th anniversary of what American historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. described as the most dangerous moment in human history. But has his 1999 proposition remained valid? Or has the current crisis in relations between the U.S. and its allies on one side and Russia on the other become more dangerous than the Cuban Missile Crisis?1 If yes, when why? If not, then why not? These are the questions we have posed to some of America’s top experts on U.S.-Russian relations. We have also searched for answers to these questions in parallels drawn2 by not only experts, but also officials in the U.S. and Russia, between the current crisis and the Cuban Missile Crisis (CMC). Given the fog of crisis, it should, perhaps, come as no surprise that our search has revealed a significant divergence in answers to the questions we have raised. For instance, while Harvard’s Graham Allison and IMEMO’s Alexei Arbatov don’t believe the current crisis has reached the level of risk seen during the CMC yet, Stephen Cimbala of Penn State Brandywine and Lawrence Korb of the Center for American Progress see the “likelihood of a deliberate or miscalculated escalation to nuclear first use” as greater today than it was 60 years ago.
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