I think that a lot of Westerners on this board (and especially the Americans and many other non-communist/socialist westerners) are approaching the issue of deterrence vs. first strike regarding the missiles in Cuba from their own limited perspective. To whit: the West were the Good Guys and the Soviets were the Bad Guys, so it
just has to have been this way.
Mind you, I'll be the first to admit that there is truth to this. There is no doubt that Soviet ideology was aggressively expansionist. They had announced their intent to conquer the world, and built an army that was clearly designed for an attack on Europe. Heck, they even
practiced the attack with only the thinnest of disguises. They also went back and forth several times trying to decide if the
ideologically* correct answer was that a nuclear war was winnable or not, and certainly had drawn up plans for a possible first-strike at least once. The documents that were released and various interviews with involved parties after the dissolution of the USSR prove
all of this, and US Cold War militarism was in majority a response to this. (It's unfortunate that some sort of inertia has carried this militarism at least partially to the modern day.) Another problem was that the Soviets could
never understand that last part, about the West not being a threat to their existence militarily. Or, if they did understand this then they chose to respond to the West's
non-military threat in a very militant fashion, which admittedly would have been a smart move on their part since they couldn't possibly win otherwise. But Russia had been nearly destroyed by Western invasions too many times, and they never quite understood how the West had changed after WWII in a way that made further such adventures impossible. Which, it's hard to blame them, really. That kind of thing will scar a nation. But many here, I think, if anything
underestimate the degree of Soviet paranoia. That entire government was one gigantic Kafkaesque Strangelovian nightmare, and arguably the greatest existential threat that the human race has faced since the
bottleneck. They were engaging in
massive projection- they were psychologically incapable of not believing that there was some sort of secret Western Deep State, unaccountable to the public and actually pulling the strings, and which was intent upon their destruction. They could not believe a thing the West said about their intentions (unless it was something the Soviets had forced upon them).
However...
In this particular instance the missiles probably
were meant to be deterrent. The proven intent to announce their existence is a strong argument here. Even though they were intent upon rolling tanks over Europe as a short-term goal, the Soviets feared the US nuclear capability. They would have preferred to keep a war non-nuclear so that they could invade Europe without their divisions being vaporized, and through the early 1960s their nuclear capability was almost laughably inferior. So, even though they were an aggressive entity they had an
intense interest in nuclear deterrence, at least until they could catch up. And if the US was (admittedly) in an highly irrational phase in the 1960s, well, they probably still hadn't reached parity with their Soviet opponents. The West really had incredibly poor information on Soviet intentions through at least the mid-1970s, and to some degree this was intentional on the part of the Soviets. And, as I have said, the belief that Soviet intentions were aggressively expansionistic at the least was actually true even if limited intentions regarding the Cuban missiles specifically and nuclear weapons in general was always a bit of a black hole. Yes, the US had it's warmongers too, but policy was deterrence**, and they could not have deterrence with a viable decapitating first-strike capability sitting in Cuba regardless of what the
intent was. The US capability could potentially be destroyed before they could retaliate. Result- no deterrence, the immolation of the United States, and World Communism victorious. Once the US tolerated their existence at all they would be unable to stop the deployment of even more capable IRBMs to Cuba. Arguments that "well, the West was already doing this to the Soviets" are
puerile and hollow. The Soviet
missiles were safe from Western IRBMs, even from Turkey- they were in the Far East. So I agree that realistically speaking and taking into account what was known and/or believed at the time the missiles could not be allowed in Cuba from the American perspective.
Could. Not.
For the
many reasons already discussed.
* I distrust ideology. ANY ideology. I prefer rationalism.
** Again, this is proven by released documents. A more public major indicator is how either side wished to emplace their single ABM system in the (admittedly much later) ABM Treaty. The US chose to protect their missile fields. This is a deterrent; if the Soviets launched a first-strike it increased the chances of US nuclear capability surviving to retaliate. The Soviets OTOH chose to protect Moscow, which can be argued was an attempt to save their own @$$es from the US response after a Soviet first-strike. Put another way, they weren't bothering to protect their missile fields because they were intending to launch them first anyway, so they didn't need to worry about it. (As I said, the Soviet position on winnable nuclear wars flipped back and forth a few times.)