Once both sides were armed with nuclear weapons, however, a new problem presented itself. What if one side engaged in a preemptive first strike, using its nuclear weapons to destroy the retaliatory capability of the other side? Strategists on both sides of the Iron Curtain responded by increasing their arsenals, creating so many nuclear weapons that even the
most devastating first strike couldn’t guarantee that there would be no response. As the range and accuracy of first bombers and then ballistic missiles increased, the antagonists turned to submarines.85 The idea was to have
nuclear missiles under the sea where they could never be hit in a first strike, thus guaranteeing a counterstrike in any scenario. This then led to increasingly sophisticated submarines to hunt the missile submarines.86 And so on,
with ever more destructive technologies being devised to counter the last round of murderous innovations.