Forty-two years ago this week, the United States and the Soviet Union came within a hair's breadth of unleashing nuclear destruction upon one another during the Cuban missile crisis, Robert McNamara, defense secretary under the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, recounted to scholars and others gathered at a dinner Oct. 18 organized by the Center for International Security and Cooperation.

In post-Cold War meetings between principal players in the crisis, including Soviet generals and Fidel Castro, it became clear that the decision-making process of all three governments had been distorted by misinformation and misjudgment, he said. "Events will always slip out of control," McNamara said as he repeated one of the lessons delineated in the 2004 documentary Fog of War: The indefinite combination of human fallibility with nuclear weapons leads to human destruction. "The only way to eliminate the risk is to eliminate nuclear weapons," he said.

The current weapons policy of the United States and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization is folly, the 88-year-old McNamara said. In 45 years of working on nuclear weapons issues, "I've never seen a document outlining a plan that shows how we would benefit by using nuclear weapons," he said. To use such weapons against a nuclear state is suicide, to use them against a non-nuclear state would be politically unwise and morally repugnant, he added.