It isn’t only the threat of total nuclear war we have to worry about but the simple fact that a belligerent nation becomes several orders of magnitude more difficult to deal with when they have nukes.

He does have an effective and time tested delivery system. They are called boats and one could easily sail into the San Francisco and send the US economy into a death spiral. Think 9-11 was bad? What would losing an entire city to terrorist do to our country? For that matter how hard would it be to smuggle a bomb in simply drive it in a U-Hual to DC.

The Cold War is over and we need to get out the Cold War mindset. Out enemies are not going to try and take us on head to head with any kind of first strike initiative they can accomplish their goals simply by hurting us enough or even simply creating the fear that they can hurt us.