Widely read on both sides of the Iron Curtain—the book sold 30,000 copies in hardcover[1]—it is noteworthy for its views on the lack of credibility of a purely thermonuclear deterrent and how a country could "win" a nuclear war.

Kahn used the term Doomsday Machine in the book as a rhetorical device to show the limits of John von Neumann's strategy of mutual assured destruction or MAD.

[2] Of the book, Hubert H. Humphrey said: "New thoughts, particularly those which contradict current assumptions, are always painful for the human mind to contemplate.

[5][6] Lines from the character General Buck Turgidson in Stanley Kubrick's 1964 film Dr. Strangelove directly mimic passages from this book,[1] such as Turgidson's phrase "two admittedly regrettable, but nevertheless, distinguishable post-war environments" which reflects a chart from this book labeled "Tragic but Distinguishable Postwar States".

Indeed, the folder that General Turgidson holds while reading a report on projected nuclear war casualties is titled "Global Targets in Megadeaths".