ABSTRACT
The drunkard's search is illustrated by the way that the British judged German air power in the 1930s and American analysts compared Soviet and American nuclear strength throughout the cold war. A glance at almost any article on what is called nuclear or strategic balance shows a preoccupation with the question of whether or not the United States trails the Soviet Union. The interaction of what each side will do is terribly complex. It is much easier to measure the "inputs"—what weapons each side has—even though the relationship between these and the outputs is tenuous. Bureaucratic politics cannot explain this way of thinking because each service had an interest in detecting Soviet threats; judging the Soviet Union on the most salient military dimension was a powerful cognitive shortcut that it was employed even though doing so would not maximize the military's role or budget.
