Herman Kahn had argued that to make a credible first-strike threat, we had to be prepared to show that we would survive a retaliatory strike with our fallout shelters, or at least believe that we would. To do that you had to act as if you believed—as Kahn did—that shelters would make all the difference, and you had to encourage people to build them. I remember hearing at the time that McGeorge Bundy had said, “We’re going to do this not for the Herman Kahn reasons,” by which he meant that we weren’t making a first-strike threat or counting on the shelters to work;
