If the Cuban Missile Crisis had not been peacefully resolved, how would the resulting war have unfolded?

Doing a little research for a project featuring a fictitious "cold war turning hot" scenario where the nuclear war everyone feared actually happens.

I was wondering how things would progress if , for example, the USA had invaded Cuba or if a Soviet vessel had attacked the blockade.

Presumably there would have been the massive nuclear attacks, but did either the USA or USSR have any plans in particular, for example any key targets?

Also, I've read that the Soviets intended to fight a conventional ground war to capture the devastated western regions of Europe, did NATO have a plan to counter this? What would have happened to Berlin?

Thoughts anyone...?

Betsy: Yeah, the USA sort of invaded, in the sense that it used Cuban exiles to mount an attack, hoping to encourage the Cubans to rise up and fight for themselves. If the USA had used its own troops then things would have gotten pretty ugly I would imagine. But valid points, cheers!

The USSR had stationed some MRBMs on Cuba by September 1963, along with roughly 45 warheads. The commander of the rocket forces was authorised to launch in the event of a US invasion, so, if Cuba had been invaded by the US, these missiles would probably have been fired at the USA just before their emplacements were overrun.

This would have triggered a retaliatory attack against Cuba, probably by nuclear-armed bombers, and almost certainly a massive missile attack on the USSR. Since at this time the USA had eight times as many nuclear bombs and warheads as the USSR, the final result would probably have been an utterly devastated Russia and Eastern Europe, a severely mauled Western Europe and a USA with major but relatively containable casualties and damage.

If all-out war happened, the Soviet policy was to launch a massive conventional invasion of Western Europe, counting on their numerical advantage to win the day against NATO forces. They expected to fight huge, highly mobile battles with massive casualties on either side, incluing the use of battlefield nukes, but expected to win in the end.

NATO planned to counter this by using battlefield nukes to destroy Warsaw Pact formations if they couldn't win the conventional battle. Of course, if they hadn't already used them, the Soviet policy was to retaliate against use of battlefield nukes with a nuclear missile strike against the enemy's homelands. I think it's safe to say Berlin would have been effectively destroyed during such a war.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_Missi...
http://www.airpower.maxwell.af.mil/airch...
http://www.wilsoncenter.org/index.cfm?to...

The Cuban Missile Crisis added very much to Kennedy's reputation for standing up to the Russians. However, what didn't become clear until years later was the fact that Kennedy agreed to withdraw American nuclear weapons from Turkey in response to the Russians dismantling their weapons in Cuba.

Logically, why should the Russians have put up with nuclear weapons in their backyard when the Americans weren't prepared to do so.

I was thirteen and it was the closest the world has ever come to nuclear catastrophe.

I thought we did invade Cuba. The failed Bay of Pigs? Let me know if I am wrong. I remember everyone was glued to their TV sets for days because, yes, we did think we would be nuked. JFK had some really huge brass whatevers. Believe me-it was a serious showdown. Am interested in hearing others recollections.
Suggest you extend this question, Chris. You are getting some really interesting info from people like Ostallen, Deserti and Uncle Joe.

i dont think they would have used nukes. It would have taken a very brave president of either country, given the mutually assured destruction they understood about the whole nuke think.

looks like the story from Metal Gear Solid (A very famous game) is turning out to be true!

By nuking each other!!!! God bless OBAMA was able to stop it!!!

Multiple launch and release of nuclear weapons by both sides beginning with the launch of intermediate range missiles from Cuba onto the U.S. mainland. The ranking Soviet Commander in Cuba had unilateral launch authority and did not have to ask for permission from Moscow Center. As for any U.S. invasion of Cuba, the "point of the sword" was at Guantanamo Bay in the presence of the 5th Marine Expeditionary Brigade. The air fields in South Florida were filled with fighter and bomber aircraft, wing tip to wing tip.
The Soviet Union's Red Army had already captured all of the land mass between them and Germany during World War Two. The purpose was to set up a buffer zone between them and the nation which had attacked Russia twice in the 20th Century. It was the Communist International (COMINTERN) which came along in the wake of the Red Army to establish communist governments in Eastern Europe. The rest of Western Europe was not part of the "Rodina" (Holy Motherland) and the Soviet government would have been hard pressed to convince ethnic Russian troops that an invasion of the rest of Western Europe was a valid objective. Even in the Hungarian uprising in 1955 and the Czech one in 1968, the ground troops from the Soviet Union were from the Soviet Central Asian Republics because it had nothing to do with defense of the Rodina.
NATO had plans to counter any Soviet move through the Pomeranian Plain or the Fulda Gap, traditional invasion routes. But, NATO came into being in 1949 and the devastated parts of Western Europe were coming back thanks to the Marshall Plan.

I agree with Drunken Fool--I don't think there would have been nukes used. MAD, the doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction, didn't exist yet as such, but by the early 60s I think both national leaders understood that the use of nuclear weapons was counterproductive. Both nations had enough nukes to do some really serious damage, not just to each other but the whole world, and nothing would be resolved. So in the end, I think it was just a game of bluffs.

Carl Sagan put it best, I think. The nuclear arms race is like two people in a room, up to their waists in gasoline, arguing over who has the most matches.

They had batttlefield Nukes ready for launch if we attacked that would reach Miami and were under local command. also three Foxtrot subs also had nukes on-board and almost used them against the Intrepid CVS-11, This is why the Russian side acted so quickly when they found out Kenedy was so pressured to invade, and how soon it would come. Watch one of the latest documenturites on the secret subs of Cuba on pbs of one thing, a lot has come out in the last 10-years. Even Mc Namarra has said we onlly just got out of that one by a hair. It would have been a glowing planent of dead bodies. 2003 anniversery speach, to Naval Institute.