“Why are you so concerned with saving their lives?” he famously responded at a Rand Corporation briefing on counterforce. … “The whole idea is to kill the bastards,” and added: “Look. At the end of the war, if there are two Americans and one Russian, we win.”

Martin J. Sherwin, Gambling with armageddon: Nuclear roulette from hiroshima to the cuban missile crisis, 1945-1962, New York, 2020, p. 378