The point of the entire US atomic weapons arsenal was a murder-suicide pact against International Communism. If you don't burn the planet after a Soviet victory you may as well have not built it in the first place.
MAD was/is all a mental game to avoid a first strike. But once that happens, the calcuation is moot. In the event of a surprise attack by the USSR, the better result for the planet and humanity would have been for the US not to fire its own missiles.
I find it interesting that everyone always talks about surprise attacks by the USSR - in reality the USSR spent most of the Cold War terrified of a strike by its enemies (both the West and China). Indeed, as far as I know only one side in the Cold War had military leaders who wanted to start a nuclear war - guess which one?
NB The only possible exception to this was the Able Archer 83 incident when the Soviets thought the US was going to conduct a first strike ("Evil Empire" rhetoric etc.) and they almost pre-empted this with their own strike - but that was the terror of senile geriatrics, not a deliberate plan.
> as far as I know only one side in the Cold War had military leaders who wanted to start a nuclear war - guess which one?
I'd be interested in seeing a citation for this fact.
Edit: Curtis LeMay secretly advocated preemptive strikes if it became clear the Soviets were preparing a first strike. This is different from "wanting" nuclear war.
The reference I specifically remember (although I have read others) is in "Dark Sun" by Richard Rhodes. LeMay ordered overflights over the USSR and commented:
"Well, maybe if we do this overflight right, we can get World War III started."
I don't have my copy of Dark Sun handy, but there is a reference to the incident in this review:
LeMay's belief in a "preventative" war was oddly rational - he believed that a conflict between the US and the USSR was inevitable and that therefore that US should strike before the USSR posed a strategic threat to the US (which it didn't really do until the mid 60s at the earliest).
Rhodes writes about the Cuban Missile Crisis:
"If John Kennedy had followed LeMay's advice, history would have forgotten the Nazis and their terrible Holocaust. Ours would have been the historic omnicide".
