"The people with the drive and resolution to press the button that would cause assured destruction of you and your kind are the absolute last people that should

"The people with the drive and resolution to press the button that would cause assured destruction of you and your kind are the absolute last people that should ever be in a position of leadership." That was the cornerstone of Cold War propaganda. The leaders who'd do this weren't our own, they were the Soviet's. And as Godless Communists, they weren't even proper human beings to begin with, which made them even more dangerous. The only way to keep these monsters in check was to let them know that killing every one of us (which was surely their deepest desire) would also be the end of them. In reality, this was just not the case. As the animated map of nuclear tests shows, the most threatening country on Earth was US, by a wide margin. We took an early, unchallenged lead in developing nuclear arms, and maintained it relentlessly for decades. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=856fWEltiXo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=856fWEltiXo Watching this, it's hard to maintain the fiction that we were the good guys reluctantly responding to the looming Soviet threat. Put simply, there was no nuclear threat when we started arming ourselves heavily. In anything, you wonder why the Soviets took so long responding to the growing threat posed - without serious provocation - by the Americans.