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[–] DukeofAnarchy ago 

That's wrong. Read Daniel Elsberg's book, "The Doomsday Machine," to understand how insane and dangerous US nuclear weapons policy was and is. The US had exactly ONE plan for ANY situation in which US and Soviet forces on brigade level or greater: immediate maximal nuclear strike with all weapons in the US inventory launched as soon as they could be made ready. And the US in the 1950s was working flat out to produce as many nuclear weapons as possible: so many that the Pentagon's own estimates, hundreds of millions of people in allied territory would die from the fallout from US weapons alone, not even considering the effects of any retaliatory strike.

The USSR exploded it's first nuclear weapon in 1949 but did not initiate a comparable build up until after the Cuban crisis in 1962. By that time the US had repeatedly used nuclear blackmail - ie. threatening an aggressive nuclear war if its demands were not met. The main purpose of the Soviet build-up was to deter a US first strike by the prospect of devastating retaliation, just as the deployment of soviet short-range nuclear missiles to Cuba had been an attempt to achieve such deterrence on a smaller budget.