FWIW, it’s how I was taught it in Junior High: our teacher dimmed the lights and had us role-play a threatened nation, with multiple-choice flowcharts up on the overhead projector so us kids could talk it over and make the most sensible choice at each step – and when the whole thing was over, he patiently explained that the Soviets had made the same decisions for the same reasons.
It would only have been a face saving concession if it was publicized, and neither side chose to do so (why Kruschev didn’t is beyond me).
On the other hand, you’re right that we didn’t “need” those missiles, although AFAIK the Air Force’s ability to penetrate deeply into Soviet airspace was limited at that time - but then the Soviets didn’t “need” to have missiles in Cuba, either. Robert McNamara rightly pointed out during the crisis that it hardly made a difference whether 40 of the ~300 Soviet nukes were a bit closer than the others.
In terms of devastation if WW3 broke out, true. But the response time the U.S. leadership would have to an enemy attack would be drastically cut. This was thus a highly destablizing decision by Khrushchev.
Hardly anyone expected the Soviets to introduce nuclear weapons into “our backyard” of the Americas, and JFK had already stated publicly that fall that the U.S. would have to act if Cuba developed or was given an offensive military capability. Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko visited with JFK after the President already secretly had proof of the missile sites and Gromyko, not knowing this, told him nothing of the sort was going on. (Most historians now think that Gromyko genuinely didn’t know about the missiles, as Khrushchev was playing his cards so close to his vest he didn’t even tell his own top diplomat). Perception can soon become reality in geopolitics, and if Khrushchev was perceived as having successfully pulled a fast one on Kennedy, the latter’s political standing and foreign-policy credibility would be badly damaged.
By imposing a quarantine, preparing for war but giving the Soviets a somewhat face-saving way out, rejecting the massive bombing and invasion plans urged on him by many of his civilian and all of his military advisors, and agreeing to quietly remove the obsolete Jupiter missiles from Turkey later, JFK achieved all of his goals and averted WW3. There’s a good reason the Cuban Missile Crisis is still studied as a masterpiece of crisis management.
But they already had Soviet missiles in submarines, which could be as close as 12 miles offshore from the USA. And they could move around, unlike the missiles in Cuba.
Not in October 1962, IIRC: