Marshall’s grim conclusion was that after a decade of pointless fighting in Southeast Asia, the U.S. had lost its military advantage. He was fixated on regaining it. Though Washington had been shocked by Sputnik and the Cuban Missile Crisis, it wasn’t until the early 1970s that the Soviets had built a big enough stockpile of intercontinental ballistic missiles to guarantee that enough of their atomic weapons could survive a U.S. nuclear strike to retaliate with a devastating atomic barrage of their own. More worrisome, the Soviet army had far more tanks and planes, which were already deployed
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