Quote Originally Posted by Brenus
“I sincerely doubt we'd have stationed missile less than 5 klicks from the Soviet border”: It was a figure of speech. I could have spoke about USSR feeling to be surrounded by potential enemies. In their point of view, to put nuclear warheads in Cuba was jut the answer of the Sheppard to the Wolf.
I agree. There were definitely a good few in the politburo who thought that arming Cuba would be no more than a "quid pro quo" to counter the Jupiters we already had deployed in Turkey.

The scary part was how close we came to a nuke war in that incident. Soviet sources and interviews after the breakup in 89-91 confirmed that the local Soviet commander had a couple of tac nukes, knew himself to be outclassed, and would have used them on the US invasion fleet if we had tried the other approach, which was an airstrike followed by a landing.

While the USA would have won the resulting strategic exchange -- our missile were more reliable than theirs as well as equal in numbers at that point, and our bomber fleet would have penetrated reasonably well -- the casualties in such a war would have been ghastly.