WI USA doesn't notice the nukes on Cuba until they are removed in the early nineties?

[SealTheRealDeal]

Even Kennedy didn't listen to the RAND corporation, when they showed him the nukes on Cuba were actually completely insignificant in the global military balance (They didn't offer a new thread that wasn't already there from nukes from subs) and that starting a crisis about them would have a 10% risk of escalating in a nuclear holocaust. He still started the crisis for personal political reasons, namely to look strong after some earlier minor defeats in the Cold War. Now, you may say 10% is a small number, but it remains still a possible outcome, which he was to risk for political gain. There are only very few politicians (and people) who entirely understood the consequences of a nuclear war.

I don't recall saying that Kennedy was good. The man practiced schizo-politics after all.

 

[Tjakari]

The man practiced schizo-politics after all.

That's another word for mad man theory right?

 

[GDIS Pathe]

I meant the subs with missiles who could pose the exactly the same threat. They were then in the end of their development phase, but american intelligence knew they were soon operable, and planners were already anticipating

Soviet SSBNs? Please Soviet subs by this time were loud, noisy, uncomfortable, and needed to surface to fire their missiles they weren't an effective first-strike weapon by any stretch of the imagination and never truly would be a firststrike weapon given how the Soviets doctrine kept them in their Naval Bastions

 

[SealTheRealDeal]

I don't recall saying that Kennedy was good. The man practiced schizo-politics after all.

Nah, with Nixon it was an effective act, Kennedy was legitimately just unpredictable (getting elected with the help of the mob only to help his brother prosecute them, putting Diem in power only to assassinate him, sending refugees armed with army hand-me-downs to topple Castro while there was an opening then threatening a real military action only once Castro had consolidate power and received Soviet reinforcements, ect...).

 

[ObssesedNuker]

That they did not tell anyone about. The whole point of a Dead Man's Switch, is that others know about it.
'Why keep it a secret?' Right from Dr Strangelove

Which is a classic case of mirror imaging: assuming that the logic with which the Soviets used in building such a device is the same we would have. But Perimetr is a great illustration of how that isn't the case. The Soviets didn't build Perimetr to deter the west, rather they built Perimetr to reassure themselves that even if the Americans manage to decapitate the Soviet leadership, the strategic rocket forces would still receive the order to retaliate. This would disincentive the Soviet leadership from trying to rush a decision, reducing the possibility of accidental war due to computer glitch or faulty intelligence. Once one considers that the purpose of Perimetr was really to prevent doddering old men like Andropov or Brezhnev from triggering a nuclear war in a panic, the secrecy starts to make a great deal more sense.

The unfortunate flip-side to this, however, is how it upset NATO plans for a decapitation nuclear strike on the Soviet leadership as a final attempt to prevent an all out nuclear exchange. Once Perimeter was active, all the destruction of the normal command channels in such a strike would have accomplished would have been to guarantee a massive "fail deadly" retaliation, with no "nuance" or "steps of escalation" or any of the other ways to control the crisis that the living leadership might have attempted. Basically, it would have guaranteed the nuclear apocalypse that the initial decapitation strike attempted to prevent.

In any case, unlike with Perimetr, we have it on the record that the Soviet intention was to announce the presence of the Cuban missiles once they were fully deployed. Hence, as noted it is impossible for the missiles to remain secret all the way into the 1990s, although American reaction to being presented with the weapons as a fait accompli rather then discovering it when the build-up was only partly completed, is interesting to speculate.