The Fire of the Gods: Oppenheimer's Legacy - The Evolutionary History of Nuclear Age - Part 3 - 1970-1980 - The Unusual Decade

The Book-3 of the series; based on recently declassified documents by the CIA , U.S. State Department, KGB after the end of Cold War and other international agencies; takes-off at the onset of the 1970s decade, when, after having developed deployed thousands of ICBMs & SLBMs armed to the teeth with megaton-class thermonuclear warheads, both the U.S. as well as the U.S.S.R; were faced with the urgent need to invest billions of dollars towards the development & nationwide deployment of Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Systems to protect themselves against each other's ICBMs & SLBMs.

The Soviets, incredibly, had deployed around 1,000 heavy ICBMs hosting a massive & insane 6,000+ megatons worth of thermonuclear warheads, collectively posing an existential threat to U.S. homeland as well as NATO allies while the U.S. had a clear overmatch in Heavy Bombers and SLBMs over the Soviets. The cost of development of a comprehensive ABM System to secure the entire U.S. had been pegged at $40 billion in the mid-1960s, equivalent of almost $400 billion today, which, still would have sparked another arms race between them. Both the superpowers, however, chose to instead negotiate to mutually limit the scope of the threat and shake hands which paved the way for détente and arms control agreements under SALT-I in 1972, a groundbreaking event, followed by the Helsinki Accords in 1975, which briefly altered the course of the Cold War but eventually proved to be decisive in ending it by empowering  ordinary people as well as citizens across both sides...

The highlights of the analysis include:-

1. How the outbreak of a potential, limited nuclear war between the U.S. and the Soviet Union at the onset of 1970s decade would have led to a loss of at least 100 million lives across each side, which was almost half of the entire population of each nation, back then?
2. How a potential, limited nuclear war between the two sides would have wiped out almost 1 billion people from the face of Earth collectively, which was almost a third of the world's entire population back in the late 1960s?
3. How further development of the R-36/SS-09 ICBM by the Soviet Union briefly altered the overall strategic balance of power & nuclear first strike advantage in favor of the Soviet Union through the 1970s?
4. How CIA salvaged & recovered the wreckage of a lost Soviet nuclear-powered submarine, equipped with nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles and torpedoes, from 16,000 ft in a clandestine, top-secret operation under the prying eyes of the Soviets in 1974?
5. How U.S.' courting of China and nuclear saber-rattling in the India-Pakistan war of 1971, in direct support of the latter, directly led to India's atomic detonation in 1974 and develpment of nuclear weapons?