Historians, political scientists, and game theorists have “endlessly rehashed” the Cuban missile crisis since it occurred, in 1962—but hundreds of pages of newly released top-secret Soviet documents “shed new light on the most hair-raising of Cold War crises,” write Sergey Radchenko and Vladislav Zubok in a new essay for Foreign Affairs.

The true story of the crisis, and of why the Soviet Union’s massive operation to station ballistic nuclear missiles on Cuban soil failed so spectacularly, has chilling parallels with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s nuclear saber rattling in Ukraine today, they write. “Russia, it seems, still has not learned the lesson of the Cuban missile crisis: that the whims of an autocratic ruler can lead his country into a geopolitical cul-de-sac—and the world to the edge of calamity.”

Read more from Foreign Affairs on great-power competition and the risks of nuclear conflict:

“The New Nuclear Age” by Andrew F. Krepinevich

“How Russia Decides to Go Nuclear” by Kristin Ven Bruusgaard

“Playing With Fire in Ukraine” by John J. Mearsheimer

“The Persistence of Great-Power Politics” by Emma Ashford

“Competition Without Catastrophe” by Kurt M. Campbell and Jake Sullivan

“What the War in Ukraine Has Revealed About Nuclear Weapons” by Nina Tannenwald