Nuclear war was tantamount to an invasion from Mars in its alienness from ordinary life. But initially you weren't outside the orthodoxy. Many people can be entranced, bewitched, fascinated by the logical intricacy of conventional logic on nuclear deterrence. This logic involves a good deal of irony, requires the suspension of disbelief, and has all of the most attractive characteristics of medieval scholastic philosophy. The frisson of danger, because they are playing with ultimate things, together with the subtlety of nuclear strategy seduces a lot of people.
Some people never go any further than that.
Eventually, a sense of responsibility may start to creep in if they realize it is the real world they are playing with. Beginning around 1969 my willingness simply to play with the logic began to erode, and I began to make connections with the real world. I suddenly realized that I had become a heretic, though not as extreme a heretic as I later became. In my thinking about nuclear strategy I moved beyond the pale of acceptable discourse in the strategic community. Minimum deterrence was the litmus test.