WI on Cuban Missile Crisis

Was there any way the US would not have found the weapons in Cuba? Could ICBMs located underground covered with plants on their top silos do the thing?
 
Short answer: No.

Long answer: LOL! No.

The Americans will definitely notice the Russians building ballistic missile silos in Cuba.
 
One wonders exactly what the hell the Soviets were thinking at the time.

It was the most logical and natural course of actions.

The US was putting nukes right on their borders using allied territory for missile launchpads (Turkey), so the Soviets returned the favor. Luckily, they had a commie nation right on America's doorstep to use.

The US promised to remove nukes from Turkey, so the Soviets agreed to back down on the crisis. History textbooks in America generally refuse to mention the whole Turkey part of the issue to make it look like it was the Commies fault all along AND that they were too cowardly to face Kennedy's awesomeness :p But of course who would take that narrative at face value? :rolleyes:
 
Short answer: No.

Long answer: LOL! No.

The Americans will definitely notice the Russians building ballistic missile silos in Cuba.

Point of order: the missiles involved used above-ground, semi-mobile, erector launchers, not silos.

In any case the Soviets can't hide the missiles permanently of course, but they never intended too. Once all the sites became fully operational, Khrushchev planned to go public with the information and present the US with a fait accompli. As it was, only a single missile site was brought successfully to operational status by the time the US imposed the blockade, but the Americans didn't find out about that bit of trivia until 1998 (they thought none of the missiles were ever made operational). There are two possibilities here: the first is that the US, for whatever reason, never photographs the site.

The second is the Soviets are a bit more cleverer in disguising what they were doing. See, apparently they forgot about their own bit of maskirovka and went about setting up the missile sites exactly the same way they did in Eastern Europe. The CIA was familiar with this lay-out so when they looked at the photographs of the Cuban sites, they almost immediately recognized it for what it was from pretty much the layout alone. Had the Soviets altered the way they set-up these missile sites for Cuba, it might have taken the CIA much longer to puzzle out what they were. It's not guaranteed that it would be long enough, but it could be.

Interestingly, it is precisely because the Soviets didn't treat the actual warheads they had on Cuba the same way they did in Eastern Europe that US intelligence didn't think the Soviets had successfully gotten any warheads on to the island. The CIA's baseline for identifying them was the level of security (that is, guards) given to nuclear warheads in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. The nukes on Cuba were barely guarded— just in anonymous vans or barely-attended-to bunkers —so they assumed there must not be any nukes. The reason they were so unguarded is not known — that is, whether it was purposeful to avoid scrutiny, or just a different (lax) security standard.

It was the most logical and natural course of actions.

There was a brilliant little mini-essay written and published on the 2012 anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis about the US's reaction to finding out that the USSR was building missiles in Cuba:

Lesson: The Cuban Missile Crisis taught the United States what containment feels like.

The lesson from the crisis is the extent to which containment is terrifying for the country being contained. Because the U.S. had been a global military superpower since the end of World War II, it had never faced an existential threat close to its borders. At the time, U.S. nuclear missiles were stationed in range of Soviet cities as a means of containment — but, for U.S. policymakers, it was unthinkable that the U.S. could end up in a similar position. So, when the USSR decided to raise the stakes by placing its own nuclear missiles in range of American cities, U.S. policymakers were inclined to compromise with the Russians on containment policy — trading nuclear warheads in Turkey for those in Cuba – to lessen the direct military threat posed to each nation by one another.


This is a lesson to keep in mind when deliberating the best means of dealing with rising powers. When making policy concerning the rise of China, for example, one would do well to remember that military containment and antagonism makes the contained country feel threatened, which in turn makes aggression more likely in response to U.S. provocations. It took trust, diplomacy, and compromise to resolve a crisis that was precipitated by military buildup, as dictated by standard realist power calculus. While it is unlikely that China will be able to challenge U.S. power as the USSR did during the Cold War, one should remain cognizant of the fact that surrounding another state with military threats is less likely to spur long-term trust and cooperation – which, in an era of cooperative globalization, is more important than ever.
 
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It was the most logical and natural course of actions.

The US was putting nukes right on their borders using allied territory for missile launchpads (Turkey), so the Soviets returned the favor. Luckily, they had a commie nation right on America's doorstep to use.

The US promised to remove nukes from Turkey, so the Soviets agreed to back down on the crisis. History textbooks in America generally refuse to mention the whole Turkey part of the issue to make it look like it was the Commies fault all along AND that they were too cowardly to face Kennedy's awesomeness :p But of course who would take that narrative at face value? :rolleyes:

Well, on the Soviets' part, they still managed to screw up pretty badly, and lost face from the whole crisis.
 
It wasn't the SS-4 sites initially, it was SA-2 SAM site construction.

US did more overflights to see what the were 'protecting'

Now had the Soviets put those SS-2 (and the SS-4) near existing military bases, it's possible the DIA and CIA wouldn't have got so curious about those odd sized shipping containers out in BFE by those SAM sites
 
The US promised to remove nukes from Turkey, so the Soviets agreed to back down on the crisis. History textbooks in America generally refuse to mention the whole Turkey part of the issue to make it look like it was the Commies fault all along AND that they were too cowardly to face Kennedy's awesomeness :p But of course who would take that narrative at face value? :rolleyes:

The Thors and Jupiters were scheduled for removal anyway, as Polaris was a better deterrent system; the Boomer combat patrols has started the year before the CMC, and one sub was the same as all the missiles in Turkey, and undetectable.
 
Now had the Soviets put those SS-2 (and the SS-4) near existing military bases, it's possible the DIA and CIA wouldn't have got so curious about those odd sized shipping containers out in BFE by those SAM sites

Well, yes and no. Had the Soviets not made it so patently obvious via the layout of the missile sites that they were nuclear ballistic missiles the CIA might not have figured out as quickly what those shipping containers were for. But you are entirely correct that the Soviets would be even better off not getting the CIA interested in those shipping containers in the first place.

So, yeah. Go figure. :p
 
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