The important thing is that 1) the Cold War was started with extremely similar mentalities and people as WW2, and 2) it was started with intent to nuke (carpet bombing metropolitan areas was considered standard military doctrine during WW2).
Do you have any citations for those claims? Dean Acheson’s book, Present at the Creation is a memoir of the early days of the Cold War, and shows that, at least in the US, policymakers dropped the intent to nuke pretty quickly. Indeed, George Kennan wrote his famous long telegram, outlining the strategy of containment, in 1946.
Yes, there were hotheads like MacArthur, who advocated total (thermonuclear) war in order to wipe Communism off the face of the Earth, but they were a small minority. Vocal, but small.
Do you have any citations for those claims? Dean Acheson’s book, Present at the Creation is a memoir of the early days of the Cold War, and shows that, at least in the US, policymakers dropped the intent to nuke pretty quickly. Indeed, George Kennan wrote his famous long telegram, outlining the strategy of containment, in 1946.
Yes, there were hotheads like MacArthur, who advocated total (thermonuclear) war in order to wipe Communism off the face of the Earth, but they were a small minority. Vocal, but small.