PN, I think we are of a like mind, my quote in your post was sardonic. Eisenhower above all else valued his men. If there had been anyway at all of not having to launch them (if it had been his command) against the beaches of a country whose population, never mind its military, was bent on throwing them back into the sea again then I'm certain he would have taken advantage of it. As you say it wasn't his call and that invasion never happened, thank God.
As to your reflections upon the Cold War, looking back it is scarcely credible how close the world came to Armageddon. On the plus side the very nature of MAD assured West European Peace from 1945 to the present, but in any case I'm not sure we can get the genii to go back home to his bottle. War Gasses were available to all sides in WWII but, with the typical exception of the Japanese, were not used. Why? Because of its own brand of MAD. That is the best we can hope for I'm afraid. We used precision smart weapons against the regime in Iraq, but it still evaded them mainly by not obligingly staying in the bunkers that we targeted, especially Saddam himself. We started WWII by bombing the Germans with paper at night and their Army with bombs by day. The first merely provided auxiliary hygienic assistance to the enemy, the latter cost us the flower of our youth. Thereafter the technology held sway and dictated what we did and how we did it. A similar opposed conflict in the future will go much the same way, I suspect
Last edited by Chugalug2; 21st Feb 2013 at 14:33.