alt Hacker NewsAnd the idea does not make sense once you include intel being incomplete into the equation: what if the preemptive strike will not attain complete eradication?
You might or might not fatally cripple the opponent, but retaliation can do that too and you cannot be sure that it won't. It's MAD all over again.
Well if they're only an upstart, they don't have the ability to destroy you _yet_. You 'nuke' them in the hope they won't get that ability. You're aiming to stop MAD from being a thing.
In those terms, the US should have been nuking and dominating everyone, and the idea was floated after WW2, but I believe they were precluded by practical limitations.
If they had developed the tech outside of wartime, and built up a stockpile, maybe that is indeed what would have happened and we'd have a one-world government already.