The goal of military strategy was still to win a war by destroying the enemy’s forces, but the initial period of war had assumed a new importance, and preemption was seen as a desirable, even necessary, strategy. Although the military knew that nuclear weapons were immensely destructive, they still regarded them as instruments of war, not as machines that made war impossible. Nuclear weapons might knock some small, densely populated countries out of the war in its opening stages, but the Soviet Union, with its vast territory and dispersed population, would not suffer such a fate, as long as it
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