Dla said:

“Bunk. The Soviets wouldn’t have launched a nuke attack over us doing 3rd gen weapons. Why? Pretty simple really – there wasn’t a threat.”

The nuclear pumped X-ray lasers were baloney so this is all hypothetical. The problem with that particular weapon system was we had to launch on warning from submarines (they couldn’t shoot over the horizon). The lasers would have been out of the atmosphere on suborbital trajectories and then burned up in the atmosphere if they weren’t used. This means the Soviets could have saturated that defense strategy if they attacked in waves, i.e. the initial attack causes us to pop up our lasers, then the nuclear effects ionize the upper atmosphere and our Ballistic Missile Early Warning System (BMEWS) would be blind thus allowing the Soviets a clean shot with the second wave (the old Safeguard nuclear ABM concept had similar problems). If we initiated the first strike with our ICBMs, then the Soviets would have had to shoot their whole wad on warning otherwise their ground assets would have been destroyed in their silos. However we would have had X-ray lasers out of the atmosphere waiting for them with our first strike. The lasers would have destroyed all of the Soviets counter strike and left them open to annihilation. Again this is all science fiction baloney and total nonsense but there were scenarios that were extremely destabilizing (there was a huge advantage for the guy who struck first). Soviet military planners had to consider all scenarios. We’re lucky that they got so freaked out that Gorbachev tried to fix their rotten system. If Stalin, Beria or someone worse had been running things, he might have opted to nuke us preemptively rather than allow us to get our new ABM technology up and running.