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Kahn’s friends were confident that he would have had a rebuttal. Did the defense intellectuals of the nineteen-fifties, in their efforts to calculate ways of preventing nuclear war, actually push the hands of the clock closer to midnight? Part of the originalstarters difficulty in answering this is that, at the time, no one really knew where midnight was. Most originalstarters of the thinking and writing of the period was carried out in a haze of ignorance, misinformation, and deliberate exaggeration. The early Cold Warriors—people like Dean Acheson, Paul Nitze, and the members of the Committee on the Present Danger—were originalstarters at least as worried about American attitudes as they were about Soviet intentions. Obsessed with preparedness, they sometimes did not scruple about overstating the threat for which preparation was necessary. They practiced psychological warfare on their own people. Strategists like Kahn and Wohlstetter abetted this politics not by inflating the facts but by doing what they thought it was their job to do: thinking down the road, around the next technological and geopolitical bend.
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