[9] US discourse in the early 1950s was concentrated on the vulnerability of the Strategic Air Command (SAC) forces to a surprise Soviet attack due to the concentration of its airplanes and atomic bombs at a few densely packed airfields, with proposed solutions involving both making the US nuclear forces more survivable and launching US nuclear bombers preemptively in the case of an imminent attack by the USSR, with the emphasis on preemption.
"[12] However, the authors of the report did not figure out that MAD can lead to strategic stability, declared instead that the period IV will be "fraught with danger" due to instability and recommended measures to delay its arrival.
[13] The report concentrated on the unilateral American moves (like building a large quantity of intercontinental ballistic missiles) and completely ignored the possibility of negotiating arms control agreements or other security-building measures with the USSR.
[19] However, the US-USSR Surprise Attack Conference (Geneva, November 10th to December 18th, 1958) was a failure due to divergent goals: Americans were looking to identify the technical solutions for preventing the first strike, while Soviets tried to include broader issues, like reducing the presence of US forces in Germany.
[20] During the preparations for the conference, one of the earliest official applications of the term "stability" in the nuclear strike context, defined as "freedom from the threat of surprise attack", appeared in an American document.
This logical leap of an adversary being a "mirror image" of self was taken despite the official rhetoric about the aggressive aims of the USSR and dangers of its ideology, and the validity of this assumption is impossible to verify due to the Russian archives on the subject being still closed (as of 2013).
[23] Foundations of the strategic stability reached the wide audience through an article by Albert Wohlstetter in the Foreign Affairs magazine, The Delicate Balance of Terror (1958).
[29] Dall’Agnol and Cepik argued in 2021 that the U.S. withdrawal from the ABM Treaty in 2001 began the erosion of the institutional foundations of strategic stability in the 21st century.