Actually, 50 years ago is pretty much the time of the "missile gap" hysteria where the US military was wildly overestimating the threat from Soviet strategic systems to justify expenditure on new weapons systems. So a pretty enormous reduction could have been been made, the Soviets would still have been deterred and the consequences of any war would have been an awful lot less terrible.
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Actually, 50 years ago is pretty much the time of the "missile gap" hysteria where the US military was wildly overestimating the threat from Soviet strategic systems to justify expenditure on new weapons systems. So a pretty enormous reduction could have been been made, the Soviets would still have been deterred and the consequences of any war would have been an awful lot less terrible.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missile_gap
Yes, but he specifically referred to a 100% reduction. Excluding the middle?