Pentagon Estimated 18,500 Casuaties in Cuba Invasion 1962, But If Nukes Launched, “Heavy Losses” Until U.S. Responded in Kind

Pentagon Estimated 18,500 Casuaties in Cuba Invasion 1962, But If Nukes Launched, “Heavy Losses” Until U.S. Responded in Kind

Gen. Taylor Proposed Major Retaliation if Cubans “Foolhardy” Enough to Try
to Repel U.S. Invasion with Nuclear Weapons

But Taylor Warned There Would Be “No Experience Factor Upon Which to Base an Estimate of Casualties”

Pentagon Accountants Estimated Missile Crisis Cost $165 Million Dollars, Over $1.4 Billion in Current Dollars

National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 397
Posted – October 16, 2012
Edited by William Burr
For more information contact:
William Burr – 202/994-7000 or nsarchiv@gwu.edu

http://www.nsarchive.org

Washington, D.C., October 16, 2012 — Fifty years after President Kennedy
considered invading Cuba to take out Soviet missiles during the Cuban
Missile Crisis, newly declassified Pentagon documents published today by the National Security Archive (www.nsarchive.org) describe the potentially
catastrophic risks of the invasion including 18,500 American casualties in
the first 10 days, even without any nuclear explosions.

U.S. intelligence had detected at least one nuclear-capable short-range
nuclear weapon launcher (the Luna/Frog) with the Soviet troops in Cuba, so
Joint Chiefs chairman Gen. Maxwell Taylor told President Kennedy — in a
crucial November 2, 1962 memorandum published here for the first time —
that U.S. invasion plans were “adequate and feasible” as long as no
battlefield nuclear weapons came into play. If the Cubans were “foolhardy”
enough to use nuclear weapons against the invasion, U.S. forces would
“respond at once in overwhelming nuclear force against military targets.”
Taylor cautioned, “If atomic weapons were used, there is no experience
factor upon which to base an estimate of casualties. Certainly we might
expect to lose very heavily at the outset if caught by surprise, but our
retaliation would be rapid and devastating and thus would bring to a sudden
close the period of heavy losses.”

Taylor’s memo came in a tense period when U.S. generals pressed for an
invasion, based on their skepticism about the October 28, 1962 announcement by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev that he would withdraw the ballistic missiles in Cuba. Decades later, Soviet evidence would reveal nearly 100 tactical nuclear weapons in Cuba that the U.S. never identified, including cruise missiles 15 miles from the U.S. base at Guantanamo.

Read today’s posting at the National Security Archive website –
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB397/

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