the aim was to be able to say at the end of the process "If I were to drop a weapon now this guy would be toast"
This pretty much sums up the cold war in a nutshell imo. Regardlesss of the platform (MRA, QRF, Subs, etc) the aim was to say to the Sovs "don't even think about it.."
p.s as an aside, I read somewhere once that when the wall came down and the ICBMs were coming off-line, a US observer to the decommissioning of Russian silos noted that half of them were filled with ground-water and wouldn't have fired anyway. It may have been that the USSR waged the cold war for 45 years mostly on hubris, but I guess it only took one Bear...