In the case of the cold war, the name of the game was deterrence. You don’t actually want to launch any nukes, but at the same time, you want to make it look like you are on a hair trigger. Judging from the history, this seems to be what happened. I suspect that there were enough smart people in the decision loop to make this tradeoff fairly well.
In the case of the cold war, the name of the game was deterrence. You don’t actually want to launch any nukes, but at the same time, you want to make it look like you are on a hair trigger. Judging from the history, this seems to be what happened. I suspect that there were enough smart people in the decision loop to make this tradeoff fairly well.