Peter Skelton wrote in message . ..

MacNamarra stated in his book that the US was deterred from a
strike by the Soviets 550 warheads in 1962 (Cuban crisis), so MAD
was operating at that time, although not named yet. If he is not
correct, the 1963 test ban treaty is further evidence that the
situation was recognized.



I would say that MacNamara, as usual, is not correct. In 1962 the
decision-makers in the West (UK-USA) knew from Oleg Penkovsky that the
Soviet Union had only 10 or so ICBMs and they would take 10-12 hours
to get ready for launch. The Soviet documents from the period under
discussion remain inaccessible to historians and create gaps that can
only be filled in with conjecture. Even the reasons for the Cuban
missile gambit are very clouded.

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/CWIHP/BULLETINS/b4a11.htm
Soviet Cold War Military Strategy: Using Declassified History

By William Burr

"The history of the Soviet strategic program is at the same time a
history of U.S. perceptions."1 So wrote a team of historians and
political scientists in a once highly classified Pentagon history of
the
Cold War strategic arms race. The authors were describing an
important problem: so long as primary sources were unavailable,
academic and government analysts interested in explaining Soviet
military policy had to resort to "inferences drawn by long chains of
logic" to interpret the scattered data available to them.2 And to a
great extent, that data, whether leaked/declassified or not, had been
filtered through the U.S. intelligence system. Under those
circumstances, interpretive efforts were always constrained; the
relative opacity of Soviet defense policymaking made it difficult to
ascertain, much less evaluate, the relevant "facts." This made it
easy for analysts to fall back on Cold War ideology and habits such
as "mirror imaging," which could easily lead to misunderstanding.
Thus, educated guesswork and perceptions alone, severed from the
deeper understanding that primary sources can provide, shaped the
American public's understanding of Soviet military decision-
making, policies, and programs for the entire Cold War period.

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