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Thursday, December 10, 2020

If Nuclear Missiles Had Been Launched From Cuba During The Cuban Missile Crisis In 1962

 

Assuming the IRBMs and MRBMs had been prepared, their main targets would have been SAC bomber bases.

At the time, most US strategic nuclear weapons were loaded on bombers. The numbers were 224 ICBMs with a single warhead each, 2 Polaris Submarine with a 16 SLBMs and a single warhead each, but 1,402 bombers, of which 1,330 carried more than a single weapon (AGM-28A ALBM and/or free-fall bomb).

SAC had plenty of bombers stationed in the Southern States to prevent them from being attacked by ICBMs and IRBMs. IRBMs from Siberia could have taken out some SAC bases in the North and the 7 ICBMs the Soviets had could not reach the southernmost SAC bases in Louisiana, Florida, etc.

So the bulk of SAC forces were out of reach of Soviet missiles until missiles were deployed in Cuba. Most of the American ICBMs were deployed on the launch pad and not in silos, so they made for a nice juicy target as well.

If you take into account that a bomber squadron had 14 or 15 aircraft (14 for the B-52, and 15 for the B-47 and B-58) and that most bomb wings had two bomber squadrons, that makes 28–30 bomber per SAC base with most of them carrying 4 weapons each. A single IRBM/MRBM could thus take out 112–120 US warheads on average.

Had the Soviets managed to get all their missiles on Cuba ready for a first strike, SAC would have lost at least 50 of its nuclear striking force, even with dispersal to civilian airports and National Alternate Landing Sites (dry lake beds).

The US would still have executed the strategic nuclear war plan SIOP-63 as there was only one war plan.

But the Soviet Union might well have survived as a national entity whereas it would have been destroyed had SIOP-63 been executed without hinderance.

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