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This treatment is a glimpse of the world as it might have been had the United States and the Soviet Union gone to war in October 1962 as a result of the so called “Cuban Missile Crisis”. I have attempted to capture the outlines of an alternative history by using authoritative sources (duly footnoted), many of which have only recently been declassified. By examining the political goals and military strategies of the United States and the Soviet Union, it is possible to glimpse what a Third World War in 1962 and its aftermath would have looked like without radically departing from known historical facts.
Because timing and chance are the great imponderables of war, it is clear that it would have required only minor variations in events or the temperaments of the key players to have set the history of the entire world on a radically different trajectory. In the early 1960s both the size of nuclear stockpiles and available delivery systems, made decision makers think in terms of a “winnable” nuclear war. Nuclear war would have been horrible but survivable. It was not until the 1980s that “advances” in technology made the destruction of the entire human race one of the certainties of nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union.