Note these were developed before MAD was really a thing. The Soviet nuclear arsenal in the early 50's was still pretty small, they had few bombers and ICBMs wo

Note these were developed before MAD was really a thing. The Soviet nuclear arsenal in the early 50's was still pretty small, they had few bombers and ICBMs wouldn't be deployed till the end of the decade. On the other hand, they had a gigantic conventional army, and an obvious geographic advantage over the US in a convetional war fought in Europe. So US strategy was build around using their nuclear advantage to stop a conventional Soviet invasion of Europe before it could get out of Germany. Hence the development of tactical nuclear weapons like the M65, which seem bizarre to us today, as we're used to thinking about nuclear war in terms of MAD, but made sense (or at least, more sense) at the time.