Zachary Keck
As Dwight Eisenhower—who is often mischaracterized as believing that nuclear weapons were just another weapon to be used—realized early on in the atomic age, a nuclear war is unwinnable. At one National Security Council meeting, for example, Eisenhower said that “one thing he was dead sure [of]: No one was going to be the winner in such a nuclear war. The destruction might be such that we might have ultimately to go back to bows and arrows.” By the end of his presidency he had grown so gloomy as to declare that if war occurs, “You might as well go out and shoot everyone you see and then shoot yourself."
World War II was the most destructive war in human history. Consider that, a conservative estimate of World War II fatalities is 60 million people, or roughly 3 percent of the world’s population at the time.Yet, to an even greater extent than World War I, the outcome of World War II seemed to merely plant the seeds for another great power conflict. The battlelines were drawn when the Soviet Union created an Iron Curtain stretching across most of Central and Eastern Europe, while the United States led an alliance system throughout the western half of the continent.
For the next four and a half decades, military officers in the United States and the Soviet Union would create and tinker with plans to fight a NATO-Warsaw Pact war. For the United States, this meant seeking in vain to offset the Soviet Union’s numerical advantages without resorting to nuclear weapons early in a conflict.
Although successive U.S. administrations came into office vowing to reduce the role of nuclear weapons in America’s military doctrine, this proved impossible before the Reagan administration, when the revolution in precision-guided weaponry offered Washington a way to defeat the Soviet military juggernaut.Although the Soviet Union’s specific war plans, like America’s, remains classified, historians have been able to more or less ascertain how the Soviet army would have fought by using archives released by former Warsaw Pact member states like Poland and Czechoslovakia.
http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/millions-would-have-died-russias-insane-plan-crush-nato-22693
