The Cuban Missile Crisis was a major event in the Cold War, and it has also become a great teaching opportunity for Dr. Michael Morgan’s course, The Global Cold War. With a grant provided by the Office of the Vice Provost for Global Affairs, Dr. Morgan introduced a simulation project into the course that gave students real-time experience with the difficult decision-making processes taking place behind the scenes during the major historical events students learned about. The grant gave Dr. Morgan access to funds to purchase the material needed for the simulation and to a graduate student teaching assistants, Mark Thomas-Patterson.
Thomas-Patterson, a Ph.D. student of Dr. Morgan who studies Cold War history focusing on U.S. arms control and U.S. Soviet relations in the 1990s, would prove a cornerstone of the effort to make a viable simulation for the History 207 class. For the design of the game itself, Mark drew significantly on the book Can you Beat Churchill? by Michael Barnhart and consultations with friends who had designed similar events. According to Mark, one of the biggest challenges was the chronological framework. “This simulation lasted around fifty minutes…and this became a challenge.” Part of the solution was to assign roles and research a week before the simulation so that students could prepare and time explaining the game during the stimulation could be kept to a minimum. Mark was also invaluable in doing the necessary historical research. This included finding information such as the number, type, and positions of both the Soviet and U.S. military assets in October 1962 and finding primary sources to use in the simulation itself.
All of this work done by Dr. Morgan and Thomas-Patterson built up to the simulations themselves. Each of the six recitations conducted their own simulation, but they all follow this pattern. The simulations started two weeks before the event, with the students reading the book Nuclear Folly by Serhii Plokhy, which provides an international view of the Cuban Missile Crisis. On the event day, the students were divided into groups. Each group represented the U.S., the Soviets, and the Cubans. The students were physically separated and could only communicate with each other through written correspondence. This was done to simulate the fact that the governments could not easily communicate during the actual crisis. With the students separated the game began.
The 50-minute class meetings were divided into five segments, each eight minutes long. Each segment represented three days during the crisis. During this period, the students would have to use the information provided by the “gamemaster” (Mark), and plan a response based on a list of options given to each team. Mark would read the responses and decide what happened, and then the students would use the next segment to react to the new developments. This type of simulation encouraged the students to respond based on how they think their character would act, not to recreate the Cuban Missile Crisis. This led to a variety of outcomes. In one case, the American and Soviet governments attacked each other with a small number of nuclear weapons. However, all students avoided the worst outcome of a full-blown nuclear war.
This stimulation provided a learning opportunity for all involved. allowed the simulation to convey the stresses of decision-making in an international crisis, and it allowed the students to “interact in a confused information environment…this element of the incomplete information environment made this simulation a lot more fun and scary.”
A student who took part in this simulation, Kevin Murphy, said of the experience: “You understand the decision-making processes and what was effective in communication, what was effective in decision-making and how can you adjust that to different situations.”
Dr. Morgan felt one of the most important lessons was historical imagination and empathy. “The goal of the history department is not to turn every student into a professional historian,” he said. “Rather, the idea is to help them grapple with historical imagination’s intellectual and emotional challenges. Empathy is an absolute prerequisite for succeeding in any environment where you are dealing with people who don’t think the way you do—which is to say just about everywhere.”