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we are now living in a fairly secure world without the threat and if we had got rid of the weapons i wonder if things might be different now,
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Interesting, in many ways I feel less secure now, as the threat of an unpredictable religious fanatic getting his hands on a nuke and using it seems more likely. The MAD policy did seem to bring some form of stability in that neither side could afford to provoke the other directly. ( It did lead to a lot of nasty little wars by proxy ). Maybe if I'd been older at the time of the Cuban crisis I might have felt differently, but I don't recall a time when I honestly thought that it was going to kick off. Subsequent releases of information reveal that we did get close to it ( almost accidentally ) on a few occasions, but at the time these were not publicised.