How did the United States plan to use its nuclear weapons?
Based on the power of the tiny Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs, the Air Force estimated that they would need about 350 to 400 small atomic bombs to destroy every major population center in the Soviet Union. That was also based on the assumption that half the bombs would fail to detonate. But when the Soviets got the atomic bomb in the early 1950s, we went a little crazy and began to make as many nuclear weapons as we could. Did the Cuban missile crisis slow this buildup? President Kennedy and Robert McNamara wanted to rationalize the nuclear arms race. They set about calculating how many bombs were needed to assure mutual destruction. Even then, they added to the number because the military wanted more than the MAD [mutual assured destruction] calculations would allow. For redundancy? Yes, but also because of interservice rivalry. Each service believed that they needed their own nuclear arsenal. It all stemmed from the misunderstanding that these were weapons that you could actually use.
