This Is a Uniquely Perilous Moment

To understand the perils of the present, it is necessary to understand the perils of the past, a distant past that few Americans remember well. In the early days of the Cold War, NATO allies faced a daunting strategic challenge. The Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies possessed an overwhelming advantage in conventional weaponry. They had more men, more tanks, and more planes—and they were massed in proximity to NATO’s borders.

There was a real fear that if the Soviet Union decided to attack the West, it could pulverize NATO’s defenses in days, and that once it penetrated NATO’s front lines, nothing could stop it from sweeping all the way to the Atlantic coast.

The United States, meanwhile, possessed one major advantage: superior nuclear forces. But this was more an advantage in theory than one that could actually be put to use. It was easy to say that American forces would nuke Russian cities if the Soviets attacked Europe; it would have been much less easy to do so. Would an American president really initiate