researchers attempting to shorten cattle horns to eliminate the need for painful dehorning practices were forced to present evidence that alterations in the horns would not affect the milk. Unsurprisingly, the milk was indistinguishable

But just because the Russians and Chinese are wasting their money on more nuclear weapons than they need doesn’t mean the Americans have to follow suit.

Whenever someone challenged the need to build new nuclear weapons, a general would reply that the U.S. cannot be “perceived” to be behind the enemy, even if objectively it wouldn’t matter

Miller reflected that even 1,000 left in place a lot of overkill; in the event of war, it meant merely that “the rubble would bounce one less time.”

When asked what the JSTPS actually did, the officer explained that they take all the weapons that are assigned to SAC and aim them at all the targets on the list. The code was unlocked. It turned out that the war plan was based on supply, not demand — on how many weapons SAC happened to have , not on how many were needed.

One part of the nuclear war plan called for destroying the Soviet tank army. As a result, JSTPS aimed a lot of weapons at not only the tanks themselves, but also the factory that produced the tanks, the steel mill that supplied the factory, the ore-processing facility that supplied the steel mill, and the mine that furnished the ore.

o, in 1964, McNamara declared a new nuclear policy, stating — in very similar terms to the Navy’s strategy of a few years earlier — that the U.S. needed only enough weapons to kill roughly 30 per -cent of the Soviet Union’s population and half of its industrial capacity. At that point, all of the major cities would be destroyed; launching any more ... See more

But analysts in the Navy’s official think tank came up with a new strategic idea: finite deterrence . All the U.S. needed, they argued, was enough nuclear weapons to destroy the 100 largest cities in the Soviet Union; this could be done with a mere 640 mis -siles in 40 submarines

Seven of the most import -ant, hard-to-hit targets needed to be targeted with a probability of 97 per -cent, 213 targets with 95 percent, 592 targets with 90 percent and 715 targets with 80 percent. 5 Raise the required level of destruction — that raised the required number of weapons