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retaliate. Nuclear submarines, because they are exceptionally hard to detect and track, provided the ideal missile bases—especially as the range of submarine-launched ballistic missiles increased, enabling the subs to cruise underneath ever-larger portions of the world’s oceans. Eventually their range would reach 6,000 miles, making the job of locating them almost impossible. On land, missile silos could be “hardened”—with concrete and powerful shock-absorbing springs between the missile canister and the outside walls of the underground silo—to radically improve their ability to withstand a nuclear near miss.
    A properly designed force, Wohlstetter wrote, could increase what strategists call “crisis stability”: the ability of a nuclear state to ride out an attack would obviate the need to launch missiles instantly—either during a crisis, or upon (potentially fallible) warning of an attack, or during the attack itself—before damage assessment has been done. In contrast, forces vulnerable to a surprise attack would leave leaders with a “use or lose” proposition in times of extreme tension between nuclear-armed powers, encouraging them to fire when otherwise they might not do so.
    Herman Kahn attempted to bring nuclear strategy to the educated lay pubic with his massive tome,
On Thermonuclear War
(1960). In it Kahn pointed out that in the early 1950s as few as one dozen well-placed Russian nuclear bombs could have wiped out America’s tiny and vulnerable surface-based arsenal. In event of war America’s B-29s were to fly to Fort Hood and get their A-bombs—after completing paperwork!—then fly to New England bases, and from there head to Russia. Kahn’s provocative arguments stirred up considerable controversy, with people recoiling at his analytical treatment of horrific prospects. In
Thinking about the Unthinkable
(1962), Kahn tried to explain why the issue could not be avoided: dangers do not disappear just because one ignores them; on the contrary, they may increase.
    But the lay public was not getting its information about nuclear weapons and strategy from Wohlstetter or Kahn. They were reading various popular nuclear-war-themed books, at least five of which were written in the six years from Sputnik to the Cuban Missile Crisis. These include Peter Bryant’s 1958 novel,
Red Alert
, the source material for the acclaimed 1964 Stanley Kubrick black comedy
Dr. Strangelove, or How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Bomb.
3 However, amid the exaggerations of popular fiction, some fictional assertions were close to the truth. The cliché that pushing one button could start a war by launching strategic weapons was true of the Soviet Union at the time of
Strangelove
. That soon changed. After the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Soviet leadership made intensive efforts to reduce the risk of accidental war, and, starting in 1967 a series of upgrades were put into place. The U.S. had strict controls on arming most nuclear weapons from the start. 4
    Strangelove
features a secret Russian “doomsday device” that, upon a U.S. attack, automatically triggers an all-out Russian nuclear counter-strike. No such automatic system existed. However, two decades later, the Soviets built a semiautomatic system, known as “Dead Hand,” in which a small cadre of duty officers, sheltered in a deep underground bunker, could decide to launch an all-out retaliatory strike. Dead Hand was tested late in 1984 and activated January 1, 1985.
Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Berlin: Nuclear Blackmail Succeeds
    D ECADES BEFORE Dead Hand (and years before
Strangelove
) the Kennedy administration thought the Dulles policy—of all-out nuclear response to any kind of Soviet attack—unrealistic, and sought a more credible deterrent. “Flexible response” became the order of the day: the options ranged from conventional forces only to battlefield nuclear use to strategic nuclear use. Instead of making a threat of all-out war that might