RWE:

“If we had adopted [launch on warning]….”

It would come as a surprise to me that we didn’t, once the ICBM threat had matured. Are you saying we were committed to Launch Under Attack throughout the Cold War?

Granted, we didn’t launch on just any old warning, and neither did the Soviets, and we both had some unnerving false alarms. It was my impression that had those false alarms not been identified within a few more minutes, each side might well have responded before that (phantom) attack hit home.