M.A.D.

With the already overly-used title, I'll be responding to Nick's thoughts on why the U.S.S.R. and the United States didn't end up blowing each other (and everyone else) up.

I honestly believe that both sides were incredibly weary of launching, more so than is currently led on to believe. Since we're American we clearly were the ones with the higher morality and therefore must be more averse to such deadly actions than the animalistic Ivans. I think the single largest indicator of this is Colonel Petrov's story about the false positive of 6 US nuclear missile launches in 1983. At the time it was as real as it got, and obviously with nukes there is no second-guessing. But something stopped him from pressing the button; something also stopped Yeltsin from pressing the button in 1995 when there was another false positive of a US launch (obviously less of a dramatic time, but not by much). There are numerous stories, on both sides, about circumstances such as these, ranging from pesky satelites to the moon reflecting a radar transmission. While I'm usually not this type of optimistic and "humans all have shreds of humanity" person, I disagree that total annilation is/was as probable as you put on.