> Again: if you want to construct an argument that politically-motivated overestimations of the Soviet nuclear arsenal were used to drive spending to profit contractors: sure. But it does not follow that nuclear war was off the table!
My argument was about a matter of degree. I didn't mean to say the nuclear war was off the table. But we now know that neither side was really ready to launch. It should have been the job of the intelligence agencies to correctly assess that but they didn't.
Then someone else took that and ran with it without double checking and added on a heavy layer of propaganda about evil empire and how communists were about to destroy the free world and so on.
As an addendum, as a good indication the Soviets were never going to attack first, was that they built Периметр (Perimeter) -- their dead hand device. They did that because they thought Americans would launch first. And if that happened the wanted to have a second strike (retaliatory) capability. If they were the evil empire and always wanted to attack first (like the Americans believed) they would have no incentive to build that system.
It seems they would have a lot less incentive to do so if they were planning on attacking first. But thinking about it, that logic seems flawed since if they were planning to attack, they couldn't be 100% sure to destroy the ability for a retaliatory attack, so second strike ability was needed anyway. Ok, never mind then, you are right.
My argument was about a matter of degree. I didn't mean to say the nuclear war was off the table. But we now know that neither side was really ready to launch. It should have been the job of the intelligence agencies to correctly assess that but they didn't.
Then someone else took that and ran with it without double checking and added on a heavy layer of propaganda about evil empire and how communists were about to destroy the free world and so on.
As an addendum, as a good indication the Soviets were never going to attack first, was that they built Периметр (Perimeter) -- their dead hand device. They did that because they thought Americans would launch first. And if that happened the wanted to have a second strike (retaliatory) capability. If they were the evil empire and always wanted to attack first (like the Americans believed) they would have no incentive to build that system.