.....Nichols: Well, no, but they’ve reacted the way that, and this is across party and personality and generations, every president—I don’t know how Donald Trump reacted to his—but every president until now has had a nuclear briefing; they’re shown all the targets and what they would have to do. And every one of them has walked out saying, My God, what? This is crazy.
Kennedy walked out of his, and he turns to an aide, and he says—his one comment was: “ And we call ourselves the human race.” JFK walked out and just thought this was absolutely appalling.
Richard Nixon, who nobody is gonna accuse of being some sort of left-wing pantywaist about foreign policy, was so appalled at the number of casualties that would be involved that he sent [Henry] Kissinger out in 1969 with a mandate to revamp the entire nuclear plan. Because he says, This is just—you can’t have this. I mean, we’re talking about millions and millions of civilian casualties.
[Ronald] Reagan, who people associate with this very muscular kind of nuclear posture, actually put off getting his nuclear briefing for almost two years because he didn’t think it was relevant. He didn’t wanna do it.
I’ll just get off this soapbox and say that the plan that was shown to Kennedy, our plan was to destroy the Soviet Union and China, just in case.
Oppenheim: (Laughs.)...
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