When the Sino-Soviet bloc dissolved ten years later, these policies were never reversed. And that's archetypical in a sense, that there are frequently events that ratchet the arms race up, and when those events either evaporate or even become reversed, somehow it never ratchets back. So what people forget these days is that the notion of defending Europe with nuclear weapons goes all the way back to this notion of a monolithic Sino-Soviet bloc with an enormous supply of manpower. The way this was stated in the fifties was in terms of massive retaliation. So that this notion of defending Europe with nuclear weapons is very closely tied with the notion of massive retaliation, which was also a first-use policy.
Massive retaliation is a deliberate first-use policy and a clear one.
Those were tied to those events of the very late forties and the early fifties. And then when those events changed and when certain elements evaporated, such as I said, the monolithic Sino-Soviet block evaporated, there was no reversal in the policies that grew out of them.