WI USA launches nuclear first strike against the USSR in 1961 or 1962

Cuban Missile War wouldn't be end of humanity like some might think but it would devastate pretty much. United States would sufer relatively less altough many cities on Eastern Coast would suffer from nuclear strikes. But USA would survive but total recovery last long time. Cuba would be badly devastated. Rest of Americas would suffer only few damage or not all.

Europe would suffer from that badly altough it varies from one nation to another nation. USSR would be totally destroyed and might fell to war lordism.
 
Warsaw Pact, China and North Korea stops existing. Western Europe, Japan, and South Korea are devastated. The Pacific and Atlantic Coasts of the US and Canada are by and large devastated. Cuba stops existing.
 

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Europe would be hit hard, but America would be lightly damaged at worst.
I wonder what would happen if, after a US first strike in 1961/1962, absolutely zero Soviet strikes made it to America leaving the US untouched. Would there be some amount of collective guilt for completely annihilating the Soviet Union and Cuba, or would it take decades for anyone to really look critically at the amount of threat there was and the effects of the war?
 
They did have bombers, granted many would be shot down,
Air Defence Command had more Interceptors than the Soviets had bombers that could reach the lower 48 of CONUS.
Then add in Air National Guard, Navy, and then the Nike Hercules SAM Batteries that ringed most Metro Areas by 1962
 
Air Defence Command had more Interceptors than the Soviets had bombers that could reach the lower 48 of CONUS.
Then add in Air National Guard, Navy, and then the Nike Hercules SAM Batteries that ringed most Metro Areas by 1962
True, how many were in East Asia though?
 
I wonder what would happen if, after a US first strike in 1961/1962, absolutely zero Soviet strikes made it to America leaving the US untouched. Would there be some amount of collective guilt for completely annihilating the Soviet Union and Cuba, or would it take decades for anyone to really look critically at the amount of threat there was and the effects of the war?

I don't think so. Was there something collective guilt for Dresden or Hiroshima after WW2? So hardly they would feel very bad about that. But European nations might take more distant relationships with United States.
 
From a presidential perspective, the United States will only launch if they feel the Soviet Union is poised to immediately launch, and the US fears that their nuclear capabilities will be wiped out so they will not be able to retaliate at full strength. Bear in mind that under Eisenhower, field commanders still had the ability to use atomic weapons at their discretion. So a field commander could start WW3 if he sees fit, which was a problem. Kennedy inherited Eisenhower's Joint Chiefs of Staff, who were very militant, but whom Kennedy did not feel comfortable getting rid of, lest he be seen as an ignorant, naive blue blood who was undermining the wisdom of the man who won World War 2. His plan was to slowly ween them out of the government and to replace them gradually. On the whole, Kennedy was horrified and disgusted by the Eisenhower administration treatment of atomic war, especially the plans of the Joint Chiefs in this regard. Eisenhower tried to impress president elect Kennedy at the White House by calling up his helicopter and showing how fast it would arrive to evacuate. Kennedy was not impressed, because in his view, if you had to evacuate because atomic exchange had engaged, you had already failed. The Joint Chiefs actually refused to turn over their plan for an atomic war to Kennedy until they were pressured to do so by the administration. The plan was a wholesale genocide, and in disgust Kennedy remarked "and we call ourselves the human race." Kennedy instituted a lot of reforms to the possibility of nuclear exchange.

There is a world where there was no reform, and there remained a disconnect between the president and the Joint Chiefs on atomic warfare. The president would exist in a benign ignorance, and the Joint Chiefs would have carte blanche to do as they thought best. And that is a world where nuclear exchange is a very frightening reality. If Eisenhower had overseen a quagmire situation like the Cuban Missile Crisis, which was a very real possibility to occur somewhere at sometime in the world, I honestly believe there would have been a nuclear war. Already, Eisenhower advised the President to move in with military force on Cuba, and his reaction to the possibility of the Soviets moving into West Berlin was that they simply would not. We know now they would have, and would have greeted American troops on Cuban beaches with tactical nuclear weapons which the US did not know were already active there. So that thinking could have been brought in anywhere in the world, and the story would always be American troops move in, likely get greeted by Soviet forces and tactical nuclear weapons, and the Soviets move into Berlin and there are zero minutes to midnight. The early 1960s were actually a very frightening time in regards to how close we could have come to the brink if it were not properly negotiated and treated with a nuanced, careful approach.
 
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I don't think so. Was there something collective guilt for Dresden or Hiroshima after WW2? So hardly they would feel very bad about that. But European nations might take more distant relationships with United States.

This is on a completely different scale: it is an act that results in a genocide of the Russian and Cuban (and Ukrainian, Central Asian etc.) peoples in a war of aggression, because that's what a nuclear first strike is. The most likely wrecking of Europe and East Asia won't help much to shift the blame ti the Russian, who in this scenario will be firing second.

Now the attack might be justified as a necessary preemptive measure, but look at how much Israel was criticised about their pre-emptive attack in 1967 starting the 6 days war...

If no important American cities are destroyed the world will look at America and shiver in terror and hate, for they are now the tyrants of the world. I would hope that the USA, being a democratic country, would exercise some self-criticism at the necessity of the act (inexistent as otl shows), but it is likely that they won't for long years, with the hegemonic narrative pointing out at the destruction of, I don't know, Anchorage and Ft. Lauderdale as a new Pearl Harbour and to that of Paris, London etc. for examples of Soviet blood-thirstyness, ignoring that was a somewhat justified retaliation against US allies...

Basically this is sort of the scenario General Ripper wanted to engineer in Dr. Strangelove.
 
Kennedy inherited Eisenhower's Joint Chiefs of Staff, who were very militant, but whom Kennedy did not feel comfortable getting rid of, lest he be seen as an ignorant, naive blue blood who was undermining the wisdom of the man who won World War 2. His plan was to slowly ween them out of the government and to replace them gradually. On the whole, Kennedy was horrified and disgusted by the Eisenhower administration treatment of atomic war, especially the plans of the Joint Chiefs in this regard

Wasn't till the CMC that he realized how far the Pre-delegation launch authority went.
And it wasn't just the Joint Chiefs, General Power could have started WWIII anytime he felt like the USSR was about to start a War.

Yet he didn't: He was the model for Jack D Ripper in _Dr. Strangelove_

An illuminating quote on him

"I used to worry about General Power. I used to worry that General Power was not stable. I used to worry about the fact that he had control over so many weapons and weapon systems and could, under certain conditions, launch the force. Back in the days before we had real positive control [i.e., PAL locks], SAC had the power to do a lot of things, and it was in his hands, and he knew it."


— General Horace M. Wade, (at that time subordinate of General Power)
 
But Khrushchev would have done Cuba differently with Ike vs Jack.
He thought Jack was weak, yet blustered. He did not think the same of Ike.

It doesn't necessarily matter. Khrushchev was making aggressive overtures regardless (a lot of that tension coming out of the U2 incident), and did not see the difference between US missiles near Russia that were installed and his installing ones near the United States. He thought it would force the US to negotiate rather than leading to a nearly inescapable situation. There is also the fact that if not in Cuba, and this is my point, then it is likely that there is going to be some quagmire situation somewhere in the world at some point. By quagmire situation, I mean the two powers eye to eye, where neither can afford to back down, neither can trust the other, and there is doubt and uncertainty where decisions are needed, and indecision or the wrong decision can lead to doomsday. There is somewhere on the map where that is possible to happen, and we barely escaped annihilation as it happened. With a thinking like Eisenhower had in regards to that situation, it would have ended horribly.
 
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