A brief and source audit for the third execution study. The engine is the one SIOP//62 built; the questions here are what the record supports and what the study would be for.
Thesis
The crisis is the one case where the documentary record on both sides is deep enough to enact the first hours honestly. It is also the case that breaks the shape of SIOP//62. There the story is a single integrated strike from the first minute; here it is a ladder. The Soviet force in Cuba was small, short-ranged and locally commanded; the American response was a planned air strike and invasion, not the SIOP; and the general exchange sits at the top of the ladder as the thing both governments were trying not to reach. The study therefore has three acts, each with its own evidence, and the visual language has to carry the shift from a regional battle in the Straits of Florida to the whole SIOP-63 without changing register.
- Act one, Cuba and Florida. The R-12 regiments fire on the south-eastern United States. A bad day in Florida, with Homestead, MacDill, Key West, Miami and Tampa within the first minutes, and Washington near the edge of the R-12's reach.
- Act two, Guantánamo and the beaches. The FKR cruise-missile regiment placed near the base, the Luna rockets with the motorised rifle regiments, and the Il-28 bombs, against the naval base, the invasion beaches and the fleet. Kiloton weapons on a landing force, which is the scenario the American planners did not know they faced.
- Act three, the general exchange. SIOP-63, in force from 1 July 1962, against a Soviet strategic force at DEFCON 2 on the American side and largely unalerted on the Soviet side. The alert-force enactment, one year on, with the readiness lab's curve replaced by the DEFCON 2 posture that SAC actually held from 24 October to 20 November.
The counterfactual needs a trigger, and the record offers several that were one decision away: an air strike on the sites on the 29th or 30th as the Joint Chiefs pressed for; the invasion under OPLAN 316 that would have followed; the U-2 shot down over Banes on the 27th on a Soviet commander's order, without Moscow's authorisation; Castro's letter of the 26th urging a first strike if Cuba were invaded. The study should let the viewer choose the trigger and say which document it comes from.
What the record holds
The Soviet force in Cuba, Operation Anadyr
| Element | Figure | Source and tier |
|---|---|---|
| R-12 (SS-4) medium-range missiles | 36 missiles delivered of 42 planned; 24 launchers at six sites, four at San Cristóbal and two at Sagua la Grande; range about 2,000 km; warheads of about 1 Mt | Norris and Kristensen, "The Cuban Missile Crisis: a nuclear order of battle, October and November 1962," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 68:6 (2012); Soviet General Staff documents in the National Security Archive's Anadyr collection. Documented |
| R-14 (SS-5) intermediate-range missiles | 16 launchers planned at Guanajay and Remedios; 24 warheads arrived on the Aleksandrovsk at Mariel; no missiles arrived, the ships turned back | Same. Documented that none arrived; the sites are drawn as withheld capability, not force |
| FKR-1 cruise missiles | Two regiments, 80 warheads of about 12 kt; one regiment deployed in the east near Mayarí Arriba within reach of Guantánamo, one in the west | Norris and Kristensen 2012; Gribkov and Smith, Operation Anadyr (1994). Documented; the positions are reconstructed from the photographic record |
| Luna (FROG) rockets | 12 warheads of about 2 kt with the four motorised rifle regiments | Norris and Kristensen 2012; the 8 September 1962 order shipping them. Documented |
| Il-28 bombers | Six nuclear bombs of about 12 kt for the Il-28 detachment at San Julián; most of the aircraft still crated | Norris and Kristensen 2012. Documented |
| Troops | About 42,000 Soviet servicemen, against the American estimate of 10,000 to 12,000 at the time | Gribkov; the CIA estimates of 22 October. Documented, with the disagreement kept |
| Release authority | Moscow's order of 22 October forbade nuclear use without instruction; the earlier drafts giving Pliyev authority over the tactical weapons if communications failed were never signed | Fursenko and Naftali, One Hell of a Gamble (1997); the Malinovsky–Zakharov drafts in the Archive's collections. Documented, and the study's central inference: the counterfactual assumes the order is broken or overtaken |
The American plan
| Element | Figure | Source and tier |
|---|---|---|
| Air strike | OPLAN 312: a first-day strike on the missile sites, airfields and air defences with about 1,190 sorties, from Florida bases and carriers | The Joint Chiefs' papers in the Archive's crisis collections; Chang and Kornbluh, The Cuban Missile Crisis, 1962 (1998). Documented |
| Invasion | OPLAN 316, the quick-reaction plan: about 120,000 troops, airborne landings on day one, amphibious landings on the beaches east and west of Havana | Same. Documented; the beaches are named in the plan and can be drawn |
| Guantánamo | Dependents evacuated on 22 October; the garrison reinforced by Marine battalions to several thousand | Naval records; the Archive's chronology. Documented |
| SAC | DEFCON 2 from 24 October, the only time; about an eighth of the B-52 force on airborne alert; the ICBM force at 183 Atlas and Titan on alert by early November, according to SAC's own history; Polaris boats surged | SAC historical study on the crisis, released to the Archive; Norris and Kristensen 2012. Documented |
| The plan | SIOP-63, with five attack options and the withholding of city attacks as a choice, in force from 1 July 1962 | Sagan, "SIOP-62"; Burr's Archive briefing books on SIOP-63. Documented in outline, withheld in detail |
The American forward-based missiles
The order of battle is not only Cuba and Florida. The missiles the Soviet deployment answered, and that the settlement quietly removed, sit on the same map and are the Soviet side's first targets in act three.
| Element | Figure | Source and tier |
|---|---|---|
| Jupiter in Turkey | 15 missiles at Çiğli near İzmir, 1.44 Mt W49 warheads, declared operational in the spring and summer of 1962, under American custody with Turkish crews; the trade Kennedy offered privately on 27 October and honoured by April 1963 | Nash, The Other Missiles of October (1997); the Archive's Jupiter documents; the ExComm transcripts of 27 October in May and Zelikow, The Kennedy Tapes (1997). Documented |
| Jupiter in Italy | 30 missiles at ten sites around Gioia del Colle, already in the SIOP//62 order of battle | Same. Documented |
| Thor in Britain | 60 missiles at twenty RAF sites in East Anglia and Yorkshire, at fifteen minutes' readiness during the crisis and stood down through 1963 | Bomber Command records; Boyes, Project Emily (2008). Documented |
| Their place in Soviet planning | Khrushchev's own account gives the Turkish Jupiters as the deployment's justification; the Soviet General Staff treated all three as first-strike weapons to be struck at the start of any general war | Fursenko and Naftali; Khrushchev's memoirs. Documented as motive, inferred as targeting |
The scholarship on both orders of battle is deep, and the brief should lean on it rather than on the engine's guesses: Norris and Kristensen's 2012 count is the spine for Cuba, Dobbs, One Minute to Midnight (2008), has the tactical deployments around Guantánamo and the Il-28s in detail, Gribkov and Smith and Fursenko and Naftali carry the Soviet command side, and Nash the Jupiters. Where they disagree, the readout carries both figures, as the SIOP//62 brief does for the alert-force total.
The Soviet strategic force, October 1962
Norris and Kristensen count about 3,000 American strategic warheads against about 500 Soviet, of which the ICBM force was a few dozen R-7 and R-16 missiles, most not on alert. The SIOP//62 brief's order-of-battle section applies with a year's growth on each side. The Soviet response block of the alert-force enactment, the bombers that could reach North America, remains the right shape.
What the study would show
- The R-12 fan from San Cristóbal and Sagua la Grande drawn as ballistic arcs, six to eight minutes to Florida, with the reach ring at 2,000 km showing Washington inside it and most of the SAC bases outside. The 1956 target list has no part here; the targets are inferred from the plan's logic, the air bases from which OPLAN 312 flies and the cities, and say so.
- The tactical weapons at map scale: an FKR against Guantánamo at 12 kt with the base's own geography, the Lunas against a beachhead, the terrain-shock lab's models on Cuban ground for the first time.
- The escalation as a clock event: the moment the general exchange is ordered, the study becomes the alert-force enactment at DEFCON 2, with the readiness lab's option curve replaced by the documented posture. The finding to test is whether the SAC force that had been generated for a month changes the day's shape, given that the option selector on SIOP//62 says generation only adds weapons per target.
- Population on the HYDE 1962 grid, which is already prepared under
public/data/hyde/. The south-eastern United States, Cuba, Turkey, Italy, Britain and the Soviet Union are all on the same grid.
Built, 9 September 2026
#/study/cuba-62 plays the first two acts on one clock and #/study/cuba-62/general the third. The order of battle is built by scripts/build-order-of-battle-1962.py: fifteen Soviet sites from the Anadyr record and Norris and Kristensen's count, sixteen American sites for OPLAN 312's bases, the carriers, Guantánamo, the beaches of OPLAN 316 and the capital, positions geocoded from the modern towns and tiered reconstructed or inferred. The south-eastern urban targets are the forty most populous cells of the 1962 grid by the stated rule, since no target list for the regiments exists.
| The force in Cuba | Enacted | Documented |
|---|---|---|
| R-12 | 24 launchers at six sites, 36 missiles, 1 Mt each; 25 fly in two salvoes after the air strike leaves half the launchers | Three regiments of eight launchers and 1.5 missiles per launcher (Anadyr record); 36 warheads (Norris and Kristensen); readiness one 30 minutes, readiness four 3 h 25 min (the missile record) |
| R-14 | Three sites drawn withheld: warheads at Mariel, no missiles | Sixteen launchers planned, 24 warheads landed, no missiles arrived |
| FKR-1 | Eight of eighty warheads fired: four on Guantánamo and the carrier in the Windward Passage in the first hour, four on the landing fleet a week later | Two regiments, 16 launchers, 80 warheads of about 12 kt |
| Luna | Four rockets on the western beach from the Artemisa battalion; the others out of reach | Three battalions, six launchers, twelve 2 kt warheads |
| Il-28 | Drawn at San Julián, not flown | Six aircraft, six bombs, most still crated |
The clock. H-hour is the OPLAN 312 first strike at dawn, ordered in the counterfactual on the night the Joint Chiefs pressed for it. The strike packages fly out and back from the Florida bases as movements without effects. At H+20 minutes the eastern FKR regiment fires; at H+30 the R-12 regiments fire at readiness one, Moscow's order broken or overtaken; the reloads follow at three and a half hours; on D+7 the landing force closes the beaches east and west of Havana and the Lunas and the western FKR regiment answer. Three days in, the union over the 1962 grid reads 2.1 million American dead by the blast-only method and 5.2 million with mass fire, from 24 detonations with no overlap between them, and the readout says no period estimate exists to set it against.
The general war is the SIOP//62 force at option 14, standing for the month at DEFCON 2, with the Cuban sites in front of it and the trigger chain in the log. SIOP-63's own list is withheld; the readout says the 1956 list and the 1961 order of battle stand for it, and that the Atlas, Titan and Minuteman added by October 1962 are not.
What it must not claim
- No document says what the R-12 regiments were targeted on. The targets are inferred from range and the American order of battle, and every mark says so.
- Whether Pliyev or a regimental commander would have fired without Moscow's order is the crisis's own unanswered question; the study enacts the case where they do and names the documents that make it plausible, the drafts of 8 September and the Banes shootdown of 27 October.
- The invasion's outcome is not a model here. The Lunas and FKRs are drawn against the landing force's documented beaches and the base, and their effects are computed; the battle is not.
- Casualty estimates on the American side for the regional case do not exist in the record as they do for the SIOP; the readout should say the number is the engine's, not a period figure.
Data needed
- Site coordinates for the six R-12 and three R-14 sites, the FKR positions, San Julián, the Luna regiments, from the NPIC photo-interpretation reports and Norris and Kristensen's map; positions to be read from the modern map and tiered reconstructed.
- The OPLAN 312 target list in outline and the OPLAN 316 beaches, from the Chiefs' papers.
- The American order of battle in Florida: Homestead, MacDill, McCoy, Key West, Patrick, the carriers Enterprise and Independence in the Straits.
- The Jupiter and Thor sites in Turkey, Italy and Britain, with their readiness on 27 October; the Italian sites are in the 1961 order of battle already.
- The SAC posture at DEFCON 2 as a variant of the order-of-battle script, dated 27 October 1962.