ABSTRACT
A strategic nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union would involve so many novel technical and emotional variables that predictions about its course—and especially about whether or not it could be controlled—must remain highly speculative. Contrary to the hopes of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, the Soviets declined to follow the US lead and to stabilize their missile forces at relatively low levels, which would have allowed for early and deep reductions and the mutual adoption of a nuclear strategy based on Assured Destruction. The notion of controlled nuclear war-fighting is essentially a strategic in that it tends to ignore a number of the realities that would necessarily attend any nuclear exchange. A war involving such extensive use of nuclear weapons in Europe would almost inevitably involve attacks on targets within the Soviet Union. The practical difficulties that would attend an endeavor to wage war against the Soviet state have to be judged to be formidable.
