our completely bio-heedless behavior of decades ... still sucks.
Of course, both strategies were based upon Keeping The / Our People Safe.
By annihilating The Other People. And if both had played-out the MAD-blueprint, a goodly share of all living things on the planet would have disappeared in the short-run and long-term.
Because We're Right, etc.

If there were a Higher Authority, it never would have turned over a beautiful blue/green planet to such apes; Bonobos..? maybe: they're happy to sit around grooming and screwing and they don't eat each other, like homo-sap and the other 98%-homo-sap relatives.

Dunno about you, but the more I learn of human 'history', especially matters later uncovered after the victors rewrote the various incidents -- the more I believe that we are congenitally clinically-insane. The few exceptional folks' sane contributions merely make The Mob appear even worse.

(I used to pore through the various 'incidents' in the nicely stocked LBL library.. like the SL-1 in Idaho, whose operators managed to pull out ("up") enough control rods that, when it blew: two or more were pinned to the ceiling via some other rods + debris. Buried in lead-lined caskets, those.)

Then 'They' == We crucified Oppenheimer / not a team-member, as Teller pushed for The Super (while Ulam did all the heavy-math lifting.) WE could have evaded the arms race from before the outset (wherein >We< pushed for MIRVS, forcing the Russians to counter, after which -- well we know what happened.)

I wrote to Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists during the Cheney Shogunate, asking if The Clock could /should be moved forward for other than technological gamesmanship -- like say, the effects of an unstable Head-of-State? and all that might follow from such a one in control of strategic weapons.. They published it. Oh well.

(I'd reset to 2 min < Midnight, right now. But that's just me, and I've only studied nukes since about age 14, so what do I know. But we know what Oppenheimer Knew. And it didn't matter then, either.

(And some people think that Opera plots are silly. Hah ... then there's Dr. Atomic.)


oTyp