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