Right, so the Nazi's used genetics as an excuse to wipe out millions, confiscating wealth and property in the process, certainly terrible to be sure, and in a theoretical US v. Russia full scale nuclear war, politics would be used as an excuse to wipe out millions, perhaps stemming from a crisis or disagreement over some resource, leaving a horribly stunted future for people all around the globe to endure for generations to come. It's hard to compare horrific tragedies like that but I think calling such a scenario a nuclear holocaust would be a very fitting term. I mean, in theory, if we're shooting nukes over there, we aren't interested in killing everyone, just the people who happen to live over there, right!? That is a good point, MAD hasn't failed so far, so that is a feather in its cap. Given that the nuclear weapon technology is already out there, we can't exactly just un-invent it, and I suppose perhaps the threat of a nuclear holocaust does discourage casual use of the technology. It sounds like from the MacArthur and Truman exchanges, when they were first developed, we didn't really have a good idea of how to treat them, or what to do with them, other than simply regard them as just really big bombs. Obviously now, they're revered as a kind of symbolic force which I can see as being better and safer for everyone. And point taken about military spending; it's a bipartisan money funnel with no bottom, held in place by some very powerful people who really seem to love that "freedom."
My discomfort with the use of Nazis in this discussion is the motives are different. The Nazis wanted "lebensraum." A nuclear holocaust is kind of the opposite of that. "Holocaust" is a term used regularly in discussing nuclear warfare, minus the Nazis; I think this is because the Nazis were so goddamn methodical about it while nuclear armageddon is pretty much a game of 52 pickup. Evil is as evil does and both moves are unspeakably evil, but at least the Nazis were evil and practical. "Hard to make a lampshade out of ashes," he said grimly. And the theory about limited death kinda went out the door the minute we had ICBMs. I'm not sure when, exactly, arsenals expanded to the point where total ecosystem destruction was a probability, but I reckon it was back in the '60s. Nobody seriously thought anyone would survive a negative outcome of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Which is an argument for MAD, crazy as it is. I'm going to guess you're younger than me.