Historical literacy
The USSR and the Warsaw Pact was never as strong as we feared, but they had the capability of doing terrible things.
The reality of the Cuban Missle Crisis is that we could have fought what would have been a nearly unilateral nuclear war, we were so far ahead of USSR actual strength.
JFK ran on what is now known to have been a ficticious missle gap.
The USSR delivery systems were always far behind ours.
We reacted to their capability and demonstrated track records in places like Hungary, we did the right thing for the right reason.
The actual, hindsight audit of the threat is not available when policy is created.
This is true for every war.
The left is going to pay dearly for ignoring that reality.
Ed