"Khrushchev had backed off; he had not only accepted the blockade but also removed his missiles, under threat of attack and without any compensating concession by JFK (except what I and most Americans assumed to be a meaningless promise not to invade Cuba). Harry Rowen had shared my confidence that the chance of nuclear war erupting from this confrontation was extremely low. I presumed President Kennedy and his lieutenants on the ExComm shared that confidence as well. Indeed, my notes reveal that sometime during that second week of the crisis, Harry had remarked to me, “I think the Executive Committee puts the chance of nuclear war very low, though they still may overestimate it by ten times. They may put it at one in a hundred.” He himself, he told me, would have said the odds were “one in a thousand.” But the day after the crisis ended, on Monday, October 29, he informed me that his boss, Paul Nitze, had just told him that he had put the chance of some form of nuclear war, if we had struck the missiles in Cuba, as “fairly high.” And his estimate of the risk, Nitze thought, was the lowest in the ExComm. Everyone else, he believed, put it higher. Harry had asked him what odds he would have given. Nitze’s answer: “One in ten.” I remember vividly my reaction that Monday to this news from Harry. It came in two parts. First, puzzlement: Why would they put the risk that high? Nitze, of all people, was familiar with the new intelligence estimates. Could it be that he and the others, like the public at large, had not really absorbed the implications of the new intelligence, or didn’t fully believe it? But then came a second reaction, slightly delayed: “One in ten?! Nuclear war … And we were doing what we were doing?!”"