My own recollection of the 60s and 70s is of a very unstable period far scarier than the 21st century were nuclear threats alway loomed over all others. Having read up on the Cold War period I now realise I was a bit deluded. It was far more frightening than I thought at the time.
The smug liberal folks working the clock had no real handle on the threat levels at the time as it was all highly classified. Even some of the high up officials involved were not in full possession of the facts.
JFK himself was for some time unaware of prior US nuke deployments in Turkey that provoked the Cuban Missile crisis. We do know that was a near thing as most of what happened has been disclosed. It's just one of several incidents of near nuclear war; probably the worst.
Full on Mutually Assured Destruction really becomes fully formed under the sane Pentagon leadership of JFK protégé Bob McNamara. A brainy business man from Ford. Bob was rather frightened to learn twenty years later that US basic assumptions during the crisis had been faulty. He did spend the last years of his life campaigning for an end to the nuclear hair trigger; unsuccessfully.
In 1980 peaceful old former nuclear engineer Jimmy Carter modified MAD doctrine to start with a decapitation strike against the Soviet Leadership. Essentially anticipating a winnable nuclear war. An awful lot that gets blamed on Reagan started with the pious liberal peanut farmer. Reagan certainly pushed SDI further undermining MAD. Thatcher was actually rather critical of SDI. The worst moment of that period was probably
in 83. It's still not fully declassified so we don't know how close that came.
The Soviet response to the fading of MAD was to created
Perimeter. A semi-automatic Doomsday Device that would launch the entire ICBM arsenal at pre-assigned targets in the event of a decapitation strike. This was only revealed to be in place in the Yeltsin era. The crazy Soviets never told the Americans they'd built it cancelling out it's strategic value as a deterrent. It was more to be a last revolutionary act from the grave.
In 2011 a Russian official implied Perimeter is still in place. You might see that as the dawn of Cold War II. The beginning of the end of what will probably be looked back on as a very safe couple of decades of relative economic comfort.
We'll just have to see if the belligerently anti-Kremlin JFK was actually less dangerous than the capricious, so far Putin appeasing Trump. Trump's cack handed diplomacy and Camelot of hand picked crazies certainly does not bode well.
