After reading the book, its pretty clear why most world leaders abandoned the idea of thermonuclear war as anything but a culpable strategy.
Nuclear weapons with a twenty (or more) mile radius of fallout have the immediate ability to bridge the class divide. Whereas traditional munitions disproportionately interact with the poor (soldiers and combatants) a nuclear detonation could thrust an opulent family into fallout bunker squalor in mere minutes, and pin them there for half a decade. the prospect of survival contingent not on your wealth as in a traditional war, but on your interpersonal and improvisational survival skill was certainly looked upon with scorn.
Nuclear weapons with a twenty (or more) mile radius of fallout have the immediate ability to bridge the class divide. Whereas traditional munitions disproportionately interact with the poor (soldiers and combatants) a nuclear detonation could thrust an opulent family into fallout bunker squalor in mere minutes, and pin them there for half a decade. the prospect of survival contingent not on your wealth as in a traditional war, but on your interpersonal and improvisational survival skill was certainly looked upon with scorn.