WI USA doesn't notice the nukes on Cuba until they are removed in the early nineties?
- Thread starter marcinL
- Start date
GeographyDude
Gone Fishin'
I very much enjoy these seemingly small PODs which have big consequences.
Keeping ballistic missiles secret for that long seems a bit of a stretch to me. A small stash of gravity bombs for fighter bombers might be more plausible.
Koprulu Mustafa Pasha
Gone Fishin'
Russia: "removes nukes after the collapse of the USSR"
USA: "Suprised Pikachu face"
USA: "Suprised Pikachu face"
Deleted member 94680
I won’t accuse you of lying, but the source you shared clearly states (several times) that Castro wanted the soviets to use the nukes if the Americans invaded. Not as a first strike, not preemptively and not unprovoked. But a counter strike to the American invasion of Cuba, which itself would include the use of nuclear weapons.
“While the nuclear forces in Cuba remain under Soviet control, all Soviet and Cuban forces on the island assume (wrongly) that the war will go nuclear almost immediately, when the Americans nuke the Cuban beaches, and the Soviets reply in kind.”
Also, I wouldn’t call it “widely accepted fact” when I’ve never seen it anywhere else previously to your sharing the link.
There were Soviet troops in brigade strength in Cuba not discovered until the late Seventies. Not the same as nukes of course but there and not seen due to deception.
Even so near to the US, with care things could be hidden.
Even so near to the US, with care things could be hidden.
I'll admit that bit was in poor taste. It was late and I should have given that a second look.
With regards to nuclear exchange, responding to a beach landing with a full counter value (not tactical or even counter force) strike is 100% a first strike, and is such an disproportionate escalation that it is essentially preemptive.
Here have your pick of the news outlets.
Anyways, I was thinking of the wrong goody from NSArchive. Now this I will admit is obscure as hell, but it's also pretty juicy (see page 28).
Deleted member 94680
How is it first strike when the Americans have nuked the beaches first?
The CIA is going to have "why the Sam Hill didn't you spot this?" carved into them.
States protect their borders, there's nothing preemptive about launching when you're being invaded. Cuba doesn't have the luxury of humoring any diplomatic process when their beaches are compromised.
Deterrents aren't conditional, it's unreasonable to assume any country would give their attackers the courtesy of a warning before they counter-attack.
It is an escalation. But it's not a surprise.
Because the Americans didn't plan on it, and Castro didn't say "only if they use nukes as part of their invasion".
And again, the other link has far more damning info regarding Castro's nuclear fantasies.
Responding to a non-nuclear attack with nuclear weapons is called a first strike. It is initiating the nuclear exchange.
Now, on the the other document I linked. What invasion was he repelling in the 1980s?
If China and the USSR, and India and Pakistan can fight full blown border wars without running for the big red button, then Castro can have the good sense to not demand that another nation wipe out America for his sake.
I thought we were talking about a missile crisis gone hot. That was the only scenario I know of IOTL where Castro is on record about how he would have actually responded.
He said he was willing to launch, for what it's worth.
Please see the page numbered 28 (the tenth page of the PDF).
If Danilevich can be believed, Castro was indeed a nutter.
IIRC the Soviets deployed a motorised infantry brigade alongside the missiles to Cuba which they didn't repatriate when the weapons were removed, the Americans not learning about them for nearly twenty years.
Even Kennedy didn't listen to the RAND corporation, when they showed him the nukes on Cuba were actually completely insignificant in the global military balance (They didn't offer a new thread that wasn't already there from nukes from subs) and that starting a crisis about them would have a 10% risk of escalating in a nuclear holocaust. He still started the crisis for personal political reasons, namely to look strong after some earlier minor defeats in the Cold War. Now, you may say 10% is a small number, but it remains still a possible outcome, which he was to risk for political gain. There are only very few politicians (and people) who entirely understood the consequences of a nuclear war.
Huh? Russian missiles on Cuba were very very significant when it came to the USSR's ability to attack the Coninteal US. The USSR in 1962 had only some 30+ ICBMs and 150 or so bombers capable of delivering nuclear weapons to the US. Soviet ICBMs were both unreliable with failure rates approaching 33% around the time of the crisis for even the newest missiles and CEPs of around 2.5 km and Soviet bombers would've had to cross three separate radar lines, evade over a thousand NORAD interceptors and then avoid the NIKE, and BOMARC SAM systems to deliver their payloads. The positioning of Soviet MRBMs in Cuba, however, gave the USSR an ability to more easily hit US cities in a far more reliable manner than bombers or ICBMs and did alter the threat of nuclear attack in North America. Could JFK had left the missiles in Cuba alone? Sure but, he also had good reasons to be concerned about Soviet missiles 90s miles from the coast of Florida which had the ability to reach Washington in 30 minutes.
Also yes the US was being completly hypocritical when it came to the deployment of Soviet missiles to Cuba the fact that they were doesn't particurly matter when it came to the American reaction.
I meant the subs with missiles who could pose the exactly the same threat. They were then in the end of their development phase, but american intelligence knew they were soon operable, and planners were already anticipating. A think-tank like RAND also put them into their calculations and concluded they weren't worth the risk of a crisis situation (I believe, but i'm not 100 % sure, they already advised the final political outcome of the crisis, exchange with the nukes in Turkey, before the start of the crisis, to be negotiated on a special summit.)
As for the reasons of Kennedy, i wasn't too clear that his main motivation was internal US politics. The attack of Nixon in the 1960 presidential campaign was mainly focused on the weakness of Kennedy on international politics and Kennedy wanted desperately to prove this image wrong. That he did have the guts to stand up to Krushev, until the Cuban crisis he didn't succeed. This makes it even worse. In the end he succeeded, but it was still a (small) gamble.