WWIII: Why fire pre-emptively?

Awwwww. Just when it was getting good. :smack: I wanna hear about the particular additional incidents and systems.

I recently heard an analysis that more political dissidents died as a result of US mandated actions in South America than those of the Communists in the USSR. Anyone know any more about that? Perhaps it doesn’t belong here, but perhaps it falls under the purview of nuclear weaponry granting a country more power than is warranted.

On second thought, I’d like to throw out the possibility that there is one “bad thing” we can almost certainly prevent. And that is once our opponent has sunk militarily below the threshold of a functionality, we can avoid pounding them to the point of extermination.

Extermination of our opponent would certainly have dire consequences for the rest of the planet – if our initial nuclear response didn’t (and that’s a big “if”) – and, by extension, us.