They also converted the first four vessels in the class to cruise-missile launchers with no nuclear role after the Cold War ended, which is why there are only 14 Ohios carrying ballistic missiles today rather than the 18 that were built.
If that was so, then constitutional procedures that could not be applied to nuclear war were simply no longer relevant.
George Fernandes, India's defence minister and a member of the Political Council, told a business conference on January 7th that, while India would suffer a little in a nuclear war, there would be no Pakistan left after its retaliation.
Yet a Soviet invasion quickly became unlikely, if for no other reason than the potential of escalation to nuclear war.
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Russian experts, such as Sergei Vladislavovich Drazdov, a colonel in the Russian border militia in charge of liaison with the Chinese military, say Siberia cannot be protected by conventional means--but cite nuclear weapons as a reason there will be no war.
U.S. military analysts figured out during the early days of the Cold War that no effective defense against a large-scale nuclear attack was likely to be feasible.
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But two decades later, North Korea has a small and possibly growing stockpile of nuclear weapons - and the United States no longer contemplates going to war to stop it.
And all in all, the totality of the UN-led international community's responses to Teheran's moves make clear that the world will take no effective action to prevent Iran from gaining the capacity to wage nuclear war.
For India, as for Pakistan, that means no exporting know-how, no testing new weapons, but instead exploring ways to avoid stumbling inadvertently into nuclear war.
Until, that is, even he and the man who signed the treaty for the United States, Richard Nixon, publicly acknowledged in the 1990s that such deliberate vulnerability made no sense in the post-Cold War world with its proliferating missiles and nuclear programs.
The leaders of newly-nuclear countries are no more likely to be suicidally irrational than the leaders of the cold war nations were.
"This proposal - developed by national security experts - is grounded in the fact that these tactical nuclear weapons in Europe serve no meaningful purpose 20 years after the end of the Cold War, and represent nothing but a financial cost and a security risk, " argues Matt Brown, co-founder of Global Zero.
Analysts see a direct attack on Seoul as extremely unlikely, and there are no overt signs that North Korea's army is readying for war, let alone a nuclear one.
North Korea and the United States were on opposite sides in the 1950-1953 Korean War and had no regular contacts before a 1994 crisis over North Korea's nuclear program.
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