"[The night prior to the beginning of the U.S. Navy's military "quarantine" of Cuba] You know, last summer, I read a book, The Guns of August. I wish every man on that blockade line had read that book. It's World War I, there's thirteen million killed; it was all because the militaries of both alliances believed they were so highly attuned to one another's movements and dispositions, they could predict one another's intentions, but all their theories were based on the last war. And the world and technology had changed, and those lessons were no longer valid, but it was all they knew, so the orders went out, and couldn't be rescinded. And your man in the field, his family at home; they couldn't even tell you the reasons why their lives were being destroyed. But why couldn't they stop it? What could they have done? Here we are, fifty years later. Think if one of their ships resists the inspection, and we shoot out its rudder, and board, they shoot down one of our planes in response, so we bomb their anti-aircraft sites, and in response to that, they attack Berlin...so we invade Cuba...and they fire their missiles...and we fire ours."