That's because we're lucky to live in a world where the cold war stayed cold, and LeMay and von Neumann were coming from half a century of the worst slaughter the world had ever seen.
We can be thankful that the likes of Eisenhower and later Kennedy, who lived through the very same times, recoiled from the prospect of initiating a greater slaughter than WW2.
you can't attribute staying out of nuclear conflict to any head of state, morality, or even logic ( there was plenty of luck involved ).
For example, after Kennedy resigned himself to striking the sites in Cuba during the missile crisis it was someone else who told him he was wrong and reconsider. (see the documentary Fog of War)
To put a fine point on it, even after all the brinksmanship, analysis, diplomacy to resolve the Cuban missile crisis it was a long Soviet officer objecting to launch a nuclear armed torpedo in response to sounding depth charges (interpreted as an attack) from US ships. Pulling the trigger would have started a global thermonuclear war but it wasn't pulled, one officer decided that against a 2/3 vote in favor.
"Later that same day, what the White House later called "Black Saturday," the US Navy dropped a series of "signaling depth charges" (practice depth charges the size of hand grenades[114]) on a Soviet submarine (B-59) at the blockade line, unaware that it was armed with a nuclear-tipped torpedo with orders that allowed it to be used if the submarine was damaged by depth charges or surface fire.[115] As the submarine was too deep to monitor any radio traffic,[116][117] the captain of the B-59, Valentin Grigorievitch Savitsky, decided that a war might already have started and wanted to launch a nuclear torpedo.[118] The decision to launch these required agreement from all three officers on board, but one of them, Vasily Arkhipov, objected and so the nuclear launch was narrowly averted."
There are plenty of examples where, basically, a roll of the dice saved civilization during the cold war. The destruction of society during the cold war was prevented by luck as much as anything else.
> There are plenty of examples where, basically, a roll of the dice saved civilization during the cold war. The destruction of society during the cold war was prevented by luck as much as anything else.
The systems are still in place and even today the danger of "accidental" start of the complete destruction of the current civilization is completely real. I always recommend a book subtitled "Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner." I won't write the details so that this doesn't appear as an advertisement. It's worth reading the whole book to get the exact idea how fundamentally flawed the logic of those managing these systems is. Absurdly, they still think they will "win."
As the poet said "We will all go together when we go."
It may have been the rational thing to do. That something worse didn't in fact result from avoiding pre-empting MAD build-up with an early first strike doesn't mean this was the likely outcome. They may have been right, and we just got lucky, so now it looks like they were wrong.
To build on what you are saying, let it be known that LeMay's nickname was "The Demon" and he participated in numerous war crimes involving terror bombing and civilian destruction in Japan and Korea.
Their reasoning was based on the idea that a war with the Soviets was inevitable and that the US should attack before it lost the strategic advantage - given that there was no war are you actually arguing that they were correct?
What you are doing is resulting, connecting result with decision under probability. I am not sure what was probability of a war but I don’t think that because war didn’t happen that it was unprobable.
So you think an attack would have been the right thing to do?
Edit: To be fair, in the event of an Able Archer '83 war we might have all have have wished that such an attack had happened (not me though, I'd be dead). So its not impossible to construct a timeline where it was the right thing to do. I'm just curious whether if you had been a decision maker back then whether you would actually choose to do that.
Basically China is an ideological extension of the cold war. It's an oligarchal society where the people don't have a vote for their future. Versus us where there is balanced based off the vote. The two are incompatible and they will come to a head. If we pre-empted this the way Neumann, McArthur, etc wanted... we would avoid the conflict that is coming in 10-20 years.
It's easy to construct rational arguments for killing millions in cold blood. Today you could easily construct a rational utilitarian argument for killing billions now to prevent even greater death and suffering later due to climate change.
In fact, it's blanket rejection of the cold-blooded killing of millions that requires (at least for most naturalists/atheists) decidedly non-rational thinking --- i.e., adhering to relevant moral principles while disbelieving in moral realism.
