At this point, Stansfield Turner, the CIA director, interjected to ask the officials around the table a fundamental question: What did they think deterred the Soviets the most? Brzezinski replied, “Threats to the population.” Vance agreed. In context, it was an extraordinary response: the senior national security officials were discussing nuclear war in a baroquely intricate fashion, parsing which limited options would most dampen the Soviet leaders’ incentive to go to war—yet, pressed on the matter, the most insistent advocate of these options acknowledged that the most potent dampener was
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