Wtw wrote:
What if the Soviets got the drop on the West during the Cuban Missile Crisis and dropped their bombs and fire their ICBMs first? Is there a West that responds? Does the USSR survive?
To get the 'drop' on someone you need to have a credible threat, deployable in such a manner as so that to deter the someone in question from responding. At the time the USSR arguably lacked that threat. Their major threat was actually the size of the conventional forces compared to those of the West in Europe.
The problem was the US had gone through a recent period where it had drawn DOWN conventional forces in favor of nuclear and instigated a policy, (New Look) which in essence responded to any conflict with the USSR by means of nuclear weapons. In doing so we surrounded the USSR with intermediate and short range nuclear delivery systems, (granted the Soviets has deployed numerous types themselves) and while the Soviets had deployed the first ICBMs they were neither as good are as numerous at those the US had.
The entire reason they had deployed short and intermediate missiles to Cuba at all was to try and significantly increase the ability to threaten the US mainland with nuclear weapons.
Vikingstar wrote:
In this scenario, do the Soviets launch a first strike on Western Europe and Asia as well?
Worst case: North America loses something on the order of 10-15 targets to ICBMs and another 10-20 to bombers and maybe sub-launched missiles. Europe, including Great Britain, is effectively gone. Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union ceases to exist, China may be badly hurt, South Korea and Japan are grievously wounded.
At the end of the "Last Day", America still exists as a nation, though wounded. Most of Europe, Japan, and South Korea are in much worse shape. Eastern Europe is in far worse shape, and the Soviet Union as a country and maybe the Russians as a people group no longer exists, and China is (depending on if America in a retaliatory strike lumps them in with the Soviets, and also depending on if the Soviets use some weapons on them) is in a bad way as well.
Keep in mind that during the previous 8 years American policy had been aligned to see ANY conflict between the US and USSR as escalating quickly if not immediately into a nuclear conflict. Russian's invade Berlin? Nuke Russia. Russian's attack Germany? Nuke Russia. Russians, (Chinese or North Korea) attack South Korea, Japan, or Europe? Nuke Russia. Cubs win the World Series? Nuke Russia. (Not really that's just ASB

) It wasn't till the latter part of Eisenhower's second term that the reliance on all or nothing nuclear conflict was questioned.
As noted the USSR was surrounded by US and allied nuclear capability and there was no real reason to hold back as IF they attacked the US THEN those assets would be used against them. Even if for some reason the "European Allies" held back what assets they had the US assets stationed there would not. So there were no really "good" scenarios for the Soviets at this time.
You can't 'win' this kind of conflict in a conventional sense, where as with any sort of 'parity' or obvious deterrent capability in which neither side has a credible chance of surviving let alone winning is actually a much more stable environment. If I cannot attack you without your response killing me then I am very much disinclined to attack and more to talk*. And at this point it comes down to ensuring positive control of the means to accomplish this and system which allows us to communicate and understand each other. The Crisis taught both side that neither their means of command-and-control nor their communications ability between each other was adequate to the task and needed "fixing" as soon as possible. Which we did.
Randy
*= And yes was all bought into the fears of a sudden and overwhelming attack without the ability to respond. Both sides had experience there with Pearl Harbor on one side and Operation Barbarossa on the other. This is why the idea of "defense systems" is so destabilizing in general. Specifically though any defense system that is capable of "stopping" a significant enough of an enemy attack is going to be huge in all terms; Size, complexity and cost to name a few. So much so compared to building and deploying more warheads makes it a fools race very quickly. On the other hand it isn't actually the "big" enemies you need to worry about but the smaller players who decide they want to play the game.
Nuclear weapons and a reliable means to deliver them to the target are a higher proportional threat. Therefore, the thinking goes, you still won't "win" but you will cause substantially more damage, (especially to a distant, more 'insulated' foe who sees themselves as "safe" from any conflict) than otherwise. Since ICBMs and other missiles are difficult to stop they tend to be the preferred delivery system of choice, but are rapidly degraded as a "threat" by a defense system unless countered by building more delivery systems and the warheads that go with them.
In a perfect world anyone with any sense could see both how even a limited defense system is a very low level 'threat' to an already existing force while being hugely more of a deterrent to any late-comers to the situation. Unfortunately it's far from a perfect world and some of the 'major' players do not in fact have large enough forces to feel comfortable about the neutralization of any portion thereof.