According to Miller, VAH-7 stood to at Sanford with 4 A3J-1's on 27 Jan 1962, a full complement of 12 aircraft deployed to the Med and joined Enterprise in Aug 1962.
Oct 1962 orbat for Enterprise's airgroup equipment was F-4's, F-8's, A-1's, A3J's, A-4's, Willy Fud's and HUP's.
I've also dig up a recently declassified strategic orbat for oct-dec 1962 which is fascinating.
We should have squeezed the trigger. Despite the Fat Boy's bellicose shoe-pounding, Khrushchev was un-happy with the fellow travellers in Cuba, who he viewed as unstable and unreliable. He also went into it scared, against his 'better judgement', if such a thing exists for communists.
The US had a 4-1 advantage over the soviets in all nuclear systems. Most tellingly, the reaction time for soviet forces, even at their highest readiness, was close on order 12-24 hours for many strategic systems. The biggest single immediate threat to CONUS was the RDS-6 tactical gravity bombs in Cuba.
Turkey and europe would have been smeared. It is likely that some expendable beaten zones on the eastern seaboard might have been 're-organized', and Florida may have had some supplementary craters installed. May have. ADC was as thick as flies on a falafel stand around the quarantine, large numbers of TAC assets were in position to interdict any strikes coming from cuba.
The Warsaw pact, Cuba, the Soviet Union, and surprisingly, the PRC, would have ceased to exist as polities with in twelve hours. The Moscow complex alone was targeted by some 300 high kiloton and multi megaton weapons.
We should have shot. Western civilization would have decisively owned total victory, communism in russia, china AND THE EU would be blowing in the wind, now and forever, at low cost (DC-POOF-meh) to CONUS, and we'd not have the existential threat to Western Civilization that the PRC and EUSSR poses today.
Crap. I might have went to far.
Anyway, we can speculate, and that golden moment is long gone.
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