The Cuban Missile Crisis

[Thumpalumpacus]

Atlas, Titan and Polaris were already in service in 1963, and contributed to the overwhelming nuclear superiority which Khrushchev sought to cancel by placing medium range ballistic missiles in Cuba.

I know this. They weren't, howevere, fully deployed, which was why I used the present-tense transitive.

So I can't say Jupiters were a throw away. It was not a small concession from soviet points of view compare to the gains they hoped for from Cuba.

We had one squadron in Turkey, consisting of fifteen missiles. They could be, and were, replaced by one Polaris submarine which was much harder to counteract. It was a throwaway pawn, in my view.