Cuban Missile Crisis goes nuclear - What happens to the UK

Be a good time to get that last pint in

Just saying . But if you need further advice.. Please take moment to review threads
 

Geon

Donor
For an in-depth answer to your question look up The Cuban Missile War by Amerigo Vespucci on this site. It has an excellent section on the UK.
 
To put it simply, Britain go boom.

They’re well in range of the USSR’s bomber force and have a number of strategic targets the Ruskies will try and eliminate in their first strike. Those same targets are close to civilian areas and a good number of civvies are fried.

If you want a good scenario of how the U.K. fares in a 60s nuclear exchange, watch the BBC movie The War Game. It’s later in the 60s which means the Soviets can spare some ballistic missiles for the home islands rather than having to use all of them on the US, but such details are somewhat irrelevant with any sort of nuclear strike. The effect is still the same and the movie demonstrates that well, not to mention the task of post-attack recovery.
 
The Soviets only had between 24-44 ICBMs and ~150 Nuclear Bombers in 1962. The R-12 MRBM lacked the range to hit the UK unless based in the GDR, while the R-14 was too few in number.
 
Read The Secret State: Whitehall and the Cold War by Peter Hennessy which from memory (its been a while since I read it) about the planning and expectations before and into the lead up to (Transition To War) phase through to the exchange and then the anticipated post-exchange situation.
 
Apparently during the test ban in the early 60s a hell of a lot of nukes would have been duds. For example the warheads of Polaris 2 (I think) had a wire coated with some isotope soaking quality for safety that was withdrawn from the pit before detonation,. Apparently the wire would corrode and the spool to withdraw the wire would fail so about half of the polaris 2 warheads would fail to detonate. This was amazingly common at the time, which means Britain might survive due to a lack of blast but have heaps of UXNBs.
 
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