It does not matter all that whether the Internet, let alone ARPAnet, was created for that purpose. And the reason is that "The Internet" is not built and implem

It does not matter all that whether the Internet, let alone ARPAnet, was created for that purpose. And the reason is that "The Internet" is not built and implemented by a single authority nor a fully-harmonized set of independent entities; and many/most of those are not committed to initial Internet design goals. They're trying to promote their own interests - commercial, governmental etc. - within the framework of the requirements they need to meet to operate recognized autonomous systems and participate in the higher-level routing using BGP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_system_%28Internet%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_system_%28Internet%... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Border_Gateway_Protocol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Border_Gateway_Protocol Do ASes get set up while maintaining/buttressing nuclear-strike resilience of the inter-AS network overall? I'm rather doubtful. Do ASes get set up so that there's nuclear-strike resilience within the AS? Absolutely not. I mean, some might, but you're welcome to ask your typical ISP, or commercial corporation whether they plan for that. ---- ... and that's before we mention the tendency in recent years for most (?) of the traffic to focus on a relatively small number of large "platform-website" providers, like Google, Facebook, and others, and their counterparts in China, Russia and elsewhere. While those have their own resilience goals - it is entirely up to them whether they want to plan for continued operations past a nuclear strike.