> Note that "establishing limited nuclear retaliation as official policy" JUST occurred. Ehhh, limited nuclear retaliation was the keystone of the "flexible re

> Note that "establishing limited nuclear retaliation as official policy" JUST occurred. Ehhh, limited nuclear retaliation was the keystone of the "flexible response" doctrine that was in place for most of the Cold War (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexible_response https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexible_response). It was probably inevitable that it would be so. The core strategic problem the West faced in that period was that the Soviets had substantially larger conventional military forces, and Western public opinion wouldn't tolerate the kinds of measures (truly universal conscription, 10%+ of GDP dedicated to defense, etc.) that would have been needed to match them. So the only way out of the dilemma was to apply deterrence by threatening to meet any Soviet conventional attack with a small-scale nuclear response. This is also why administrations of both parties consistently rejected the demand of the anti-proliferation movement for a "no first use" pledge (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_first_use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_first_use) -- they knew that, in any real shooting war, NATO would almost certainly have to bring out its nukes first, simply because it had no other realistic way to stop the much larger Soviet armies from steamrolling across Europe.