Amerigo,
I should have labeled my observations as a quibble because that's all it was. Honest.
Don't worry, I didn't take it as anything more than that. I want people to pick this timeline apart, find holes that I've overlooked, and take advantage of things I didn't cover. Thande's post was particularly helpful, and it's that kind of thing that helps me make this TL better.
The order had been rescinded but had the Foxtrots recieved that order yet? Cold War submarine operations are still shrouded in great secrecy, even ops from over 40 years ago. ForEx: there's a new book out claiming that USS Scorpion was deliberately sunk by the USSR and presents what is supposedly photographic evidence of that claim. (I've yet to read the book and cannot even begin to judge it's veracity however. Knee jerking here; I think the claims are nonsense.)
Agreed. I don't have an exact time of transmission of that telegram, so I can't be sure as to whether the Soviet submarines in the Caribbean recieved a similar one or not. The one in the link says nothing at all about submarine weapons, so I'm merely guessing that a similar message was sent. If not, he'd still be operating under the pre-conflict ROE, which gave him permission to arm the torpedo and use it only if he was in grave danger.
I'm running this TL under the assumption that no one, even Capt. Stavinsky, wants to start a nuclear war. It results not from willful action, but from accident, happenstance, miscommunication, and faulty intelligence.
Another [quibble with regards to Savitsky contacting Moscow, he would have had to raise a radio mast from periscope depth. They had no VLF capabilities at the time. With two destroyers 'trying to establish contact' via the dropping of hand grenades, coming to periscope depth doesn't seem like a very good idea.
Thanks for clarifying this for me. I was pretty sure that no one had ELF capability at this time -- the US didn't build its first big ELF antenna until the 1970s, IIRC. I'll have to clarify that section, giving your reason why they couldn't make contact with Moscow.
No one wants to be the one to shoot first, but Savitsky and the other Foxtrot captains were hand-picked for this mission and extensively briefed. They sailed with greater local control over nuclear weapons than any other Soviet officer every had prior to that time and greater control than any other Soviet officer would ever have again. We now know that Krushchev's actions in this regard were a big part of the post-Crisis political fallout he suffered and that fallout eventually helped lead to his removal from power.
Agreed. The post-Crisis removal of Krushchev was the primary reason I introduced the Moscow Plotters into the TL. In OTL, Krushchev's economic and agricultural reform failures backlit his percieved failure in the Cuban Missile Crisis. Here, as the situation escalates, that sense of percieved failure is going to be enormously high. Pressing on Krushchev's mind is the fact that he knows of the enormous missile gap between the Soviet Union and the United States. Added to that fact is the discovery of Penkovsky's spying for the United States. The revelation only a few months previous that he had revealed everything to the CIA means that not only does Krushchev know that he's behind in the arms race, but that the United States knows how far it is ahead. That makes him especially nervous, and was a big reason he backed down in OTL. Many of the Moscow Plotters won't have that information, and so Krushchev's willingness to back down will come as an unexpected shock.