Former defence secretary Robert McNamara, seconded by Theodore Sorenson, president John F. Kennedy's speechwriter at the time of the crisis, used the occasion of a Moscow screening of the Hollywood movie "Thirteen Days" on Wednesday to reaffirm his belief that the world came "a hair's-breadth from destruction."

He told an audience of Russian and American officials, including many who had taken part in the events of October 1962, that the world had "lucked out" at the time but that it "cannot continue to depend on luck" to avert a nuclear holocaust.

The lesson of the film, which he praised in spite of "several historical inaccuracies" was, in his words, that "the indefinite combination of human fallibility with nuclear weapons will lead to the destruction of humanity".

Noting that even as he spoke 6,500 Russian warheads were targeted at the United States, while 7,500 US warheads were aimed at Russia, including 2,500 on 15-minute alert, McNamara insisted that "we must eliminate nuclear weapons."

Immediate steps could be taken by accelerating the present rate of elimination and by strengthening non-proliferation accords, he said.

Sorenson endorsed McNamara's view that the crisis, in which Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev agreed to withdraw missiles from Cuba after a tense game of bluff and counter-bluff with Kennedy, ended peacefully "solely because we were lucky".

He ran through a long list of "what-ifs", leading off with the question "what if Kennedy had given way to the US joint chiefs of staff, several Congressmen and his secretary of state Dean Acheson who wanted him to launch attacks on Cuba?"

In each case, he said, the answer was: "We would not be here today," and he denounced the "folly of our present nuclear arsenals and the levels of alert at which they are maintained".

McNamara and General Anatoly Gribkov, who was deputy chief of the Russian general staff's operational department at the time of the crisis, stressed how both sides had made serious miscalculations about the other's intentions and capabilities.

It was only when he met Gribkov in Havana in 1992 that he learnt that the Soviet Union had installed 162 warheads on the island, McNamara said.

Gribkov said that "US intelligence wasn't good enough," but he stressed that, by contrast with scenes shown in the film, none of the missiles in Cuba were fitted with nuclear weapons, or fuelled, or even standing upright.

Gribkov regretted that though Russia two or three years ago made a formal declaration that it would never resort to a first strike, there had been no reciprocal commitment by the United States or any other nation.

The only surviving political leader at the time of the 1962 crisis, Cuba's President Fidel Castro, saw the film on Monday in the presence of its star and producer, Kevin Costner, and a celebrity audience in the Palace of the Revolution in Havana.

The ageing leader, who has seven US presidents and five Kremlin leaders come and go since the missile crisis, reportedly enjoyed it.

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