So by presenting a “potential” number of missiles as “the soviets had this many” what were the consequences?
This led to more funding for the USA to build weapons, which in turn caused the soviets to build more? Or did it deter a “sneak attack” where the soviets could build in secret far more missiles and win a nuclear war?
Basically until the USA had enough arms for “assured destruction” this was a risk. A more realistic view of how many missiles the Soviets probably had extends the number of years there isn’t enough funding to pay for “assured destruction”.
Then again maybe the scenario where by the 1980s, civilization ending numbers of missiles were possessed by each side could have been avoided.
My point here is that a policy of honesty may not really work in a situation where the other side is a bad actor.
Read The Doomsday Machine. The US Air Force is way less of a defensive or utilitarian actor than you are implying, e.g. for a significant period of time the only US nuclear war plan (which was hidden from Kennedy) involved bombing as many Chinese cities as possible even if it was Russia who had attacked the US. (In general I avoid giving the benefit of the doubt to dishonest violent criminals even if they call themselves “the government”, but here we have extra empirical data)
I am not arguing that. I know the government does bad things and I read other books on that era. I was really just noting the consequences of an alternate policy might not have been any better.
So by presenting a “potential” number of missiles as “the soviets had this many” what were the consequences?
This led to more funding for the USA to build weapons, which in turn caused the soviets to build more? Or did it deter a “sneak attack” where the soviets could build in secret far more missiles and win a nuclear war?
Basically until the USA had enough arms for “assured destruction” this was a risk. A more realistic view of how many missiles the Soviets probably had extends the number of years there isn’t enough funding to pay for “assured destruction”.
Then again maybe the scenario where by the 1980s, civilization ending numbers of missiles were possessed by each side could have been avoided.
My point here is that a policy of honesty may not really work in a situation where the other side is a bad actor.
Read The Doomsday Machine. The US Air Force is way less of a defensive or utilitarian actor than you are implying, e.g. for a significant period of time the only US nuclear war plan (which was hidden from Kennedy) involved bombing as many Chinese cities as possible even if it was Russia who had attacked the US. (In general I avoid giving the benefit of the doubt to dishonest violent criminals even if they call themselves “the government”, but here we have extra empirical data)
I am not arguing that. I know the government does bad things and I read other books on that era. I was really just noting the consequences of an alternate policy might not have been any better.