The US
LGM-30 Minuteman was a real triumph of American science and engineering. So far as I am aware, the Soviets were not able to deploy anything comparable before their collapse in 1991.
The Minuteman was cheap, could stand ready with minimal maintenance for extended periods of time, could be launched at a moment's notice and did not use volatile - or worse volatile and toxic - liquid propellants, which on both sides of the Cold War would claim the lives of many of the men who had to work with them.
The Minuteman (heavily upgraded) is still deployed today, which is pretty good for a rocket first deployed in 1962.
The closest Soviet equivalent was the
RT-2, was a far inferior weapon and would be retired in 1976 after only a decade of service.
The
UGM-27 Polaris was similarly a very effective weapon system, with the safety benefits of solids being even more important in the confined quarters of a submarine. It would serve to 1996.
The Soviets never seem to have managed to make a solid fuel naval missile to the detriment of their reaction speed and the safety of their crews.
Changing this would need the Soviets to be more developed in several areas. Most significantly, they'd need to master ammonium perchlorate composites which, so far as I am aware, they did not OTL, instead using more low-powered propellants in their solid rockets. Again, so far as I am aware, the difficulty with developing high-energy solids in OTL was that their chemical industry was insufficiently developed, so perhaps the necessary PoD would need to be the 1950s push to develop the chemical industries lasting longer...
Additionally, both the Minuteman and Polaris needed very small electronics for their computers and the computers of their silos/subs. (Interestingly, both missiles seem to have been big drivers of US electronic miniaturization.) Absent similarly compact electronics, any Soviet equivalents would have poorer accuracy. I'm not sure what PoD might push the Soviets forward in this area.
What impacts would the Soviets possessing such weapons have?
Certainly it would be a big development for the Soviets - even if they manage to steal a significant part of the tech for a Minuteman missile, the Soviets would still need to develop the industrial base to manufacture their own, do their own tests, bend their own metal. Depending on when they started their own ammonium perchlorate solid missile program, it would mean other things would lack funding.
For example, they might decide not to compete in the moon race, or later on to not try to build their own space shuttle, or not fund their own speculative missile tech programs as well or at all - for example, there might be no
gnom missile.
Successfully developing such weapons would make the Soviet deterrent cheaper and save many lives - both of which could have big impacts, but with both the second-order changes are hard to really predict.
Having a "Red Minuteman" in mass production might mean that the Soviets, just like the Americans, end up using lots of solid rockets as boosters for their launch vehicles.
What do other people think?
fasquardon