There's also the problem that we didn't want the USSR to know that we knew that they didn't have very many ICBMS[1]. So Eisenhower and Kennedy felt they had to

There's also the problem that we didn't want the USSR to know that we knew that they didn't have very many ICBMS[1]. So Eisenhower and Kennedy felt they had to pretend in public that there was a missile gap, and spent most of their days pretending hard that there was a missile gap. And if you spend most of the day pretending something is true there's no way that doesn't warp your gut level understanding of the world. So was our knowledge of the USSR's actual capabilities useful if we didn't let it affect our policy making? [1] They had more than enough shorter range missiles to take out ~everyone in western Europe though.