It is true that Trident II missiles would survive a first strike. But it is also true that they were accurate enough and carried enough warheads, and could get close enough to Soviet missile silos that Trident II is exactly the kind of weapon system you build if you wanted to launch a first strike. Several years later, a couple of American generals had retrained the Croats. It took the Croats about twelve hours to run off the Serbs. An odd quirk of the human mind allows inconsistent beliefs and values.
Most people acquire their core beliefs and values from experiences without much analysis.
So a conservative is a liberal who was mugged, and a liberal is a conservative who was arrested. Part of the irony of democracy is that the masses do not generally have democratic values. Take a straw poll in the U.S. and people will gladly write off freedom of political expression to keep people from burning a piece of cloth called our flag and endowed with the symbolism of democracy. Feminists will kill freedom of speech to get rid of pornography. Other groups will restrict the liberties of homosexuals.