Now that our national security brain trusts are about to get us into a tussle in Syria and perhaps Iran and more than likely North Korea...let's brush up on our mutually assured destruction training. Years back, we had drills in our elementary school called "duck and cover". The country, by in large, was under the belief that the Soviet Union was going to launch a massive air raid on Dayton, Ohio and atomic bombs would rain down on us like, well, rain.
Everyone in my neighborhood took civil defense training. We were given a set of binoculars and an airplane identifier handbook that featured all the USAF planes and, of course, the bombers from Russia We took turns after school being "on the alert" and each of us would, for 1 hour a week, be the early warning system for Dayton, Ohio. Ohio. 800 miles from New York. 5,000 miles from western Russia. Dayton, Ohio. Likelihood noted.
As a nation, we were less than a decade out of Hiroshimaand treated regularly to the 6 am vision of the tests in Nevada, buildings blown apart, shock wave swaying everything just before the walls exploded, etc.. We were a nation afraid of what was, to that date, our most "magnificent" concentrated science experiment; think Mr. Wizard on steroids.
Some brain trust found you could boil water with the heat from a controlled nuclear reaction and our bomb makers could make all the fuel they needed and then some with the "then some", from enrichment facilities in South Carolina, Tennessee, Colorado and Washington state, going into power plants to boil water, turn steam turbines and light the lights. We had the perfect solution. Cheap energy (if you didn't count the $billions that the government tossed into the pot as seed money) and a deterrent to the Red Menace. This is the same mentality as the NRA's plan to counter sickos who gun down children by arming teachers; a mini cold war.
Mutually assured destruction; now that I've thought this all out, I'm good to go