When nuclear fission weapons were first built, every Military establishment on the planet planed how to fight a nuclear war. The problem is that to make a bigger bomb, you required more fissile matirial and it became less efficiant. The damage goes up as the cube-root of the yeald. A twenty KT bomb used 10 kilos, but a 500KT bomb used 125 kilos of fissile stuff. Since there was a finite quantity of fissile matirial, there was a limmet on how many and how large the targets you could attack. Nuclear war was not only possable, but practicle. They could not kill a significant number of us, and vice verse.
Then came the thermonuclear weapon which devorced the yeald from the amount of fissile matirial. Yeald was now a function of the weight of lithum duteride and depleted U-238, niether of which can make a fission A-bomb. This multiplied both the number and yeald of the entire arsenal.
Now there were larger and more than enough weapons to cause massive casualties on both sides and still have weapons left over. This is when they all realised that nuclear war was no longer plausable IF we were to survive. Untill this revalation, War as we knew it was still possable. WW-II killed dozens of millions. They contemplated using nucs in Korea. But the advent of thermo-nuclear weapons precluded conventional war between major powers.
If you look at the history or the rate of death in war from before Christ to Korea, there is a steady increase in the number and rate of growth of that graph. But with the successful detonation of Mike in 1954, that line takes a nose dive! Now the super powers were forced to restrain their client states and the total death rate dropped to insignificant levels! Counting all war, every where, less than a million deaths per year now and how many millions per year before?
The only honest conclusion is that the Thermo-Nuclear Weapon was the single greatest thing to happen to humanity after Christ!
