Khrushchev’s son Sergei recently explained that he believes the American worldview paradoxically grows out of the fact we’ve faced so few genuine threats. “The enemy at the gate, missiles on your borders … is part of [Russian] historical experience,” according to the younger Khrushchev, who is now a senior fellow at the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University. “When Americans placed missile bases in Turkey or any other European country [it] didn’t create any panic … Americans were lucky. They lived all the time protected by two oceans. So they’re scared at everything as a nation. … In 1962 [Americans] found they could be killed just the same as any others because of the crisis. … Here it appears they are vulnerable, they can be killed also. This created the panic.”

And that brings us to our conflict today with North Korea. The U.S. of course has possessed the ability to instantly destroy North Korea with nuclear weapons for 60 years. Moreover, we already leveled the country once with conventional weapons during the 1950s, killing perhaps one-fifth of its population. The equivalent number of deaths for the U.S. today would be over 60 million people.

That, however, has never been a “crisis,” just as it was not a crisis when the Kennedy administration put nuclear missiles in Italy and Turkey. It has become a crisis because it appears North Korea may be close to being able to put nuclear weapons on ICBMs that can reach the continental U.S.

Now, in an echo of Kennedy’s September 1962 remarks, Trump has declared that that “won’t happen!” Just as during the Cuban missile crisis, we start from the position that we must have the power to kill others, but it is illegitimate for them to have the power to kill us.

Where this crisis goes from here is anyone’s guess, especially with someone as dangerous as Trump in charge of America’s nuclear arsenal. But if the U.S. and the world make it out of this one alive, perhaps Americans will finally learn what they should have figured out in 1962.

“The 55th anniversary of the missile crisis is coming up,” says Kornbluh. “It’s a big reminder of the danger of having nuclear weapons in human hands, since human beings are fallible. The people involved in the Cuban missile crisis … understood that one of the main lessons was that as long as there are nuclear weapons, the danger of them being fired, even in accident, is real. The current crisis speaks to the need for non-proliferation and denuclearizing.”