 This game-theoretic analysis caused genuine consternation and fear on both sides during the Cold War, and is reputed to have produced some striking attempts at setting up strategic commitment devices. Some anecdotes, for example, allege that President Nixon had the CIA try to convince the Russians that he was insane or frequently drunk, so that they’d believe that he’d launch a retaliatory strike even when it was no longer in his interest to do so. Similarly, the Soviet KGB is sometimes claimed, during Brezhnev’s later years, to to have fabricated medical reports exaggerating the extent of his senility with the same end in mind. Even if these stories aren’t true, their persistent circulation indicates understanding of the logic of strategic commitment. Ultimately, the strategic symmetry that concerned the Pentagon’s analysts was complicated and perhaps broken by changes in American missile deployment tactics. They equipped a worldwide fleet of submarines with enough missiles to launch a devastating counterattack by themselves. This made the reliability of the US military communications network less straightforward, and in so doing introduced an element of strategically relevant uncertainty. The President probably could be less sure to be able to reach the submarines and cancel their orders to attack if prospects of American survival had become hopeless. Of course, the value of this in breaking symmetry depended on the Russians being aware of the potential problem. In Stanley Kubrick’s classic film Dr. Strangelove, the world is destroyed by accident because the Russians build a doomsday machine that will automatically trigger a retaliatory strike regardless of their leadership’s resolve to follow through on the implicit MAD threat but then keep it a secret. As a result, when an unequivocally mad American colonel launches missiles at Russia on his own accord, and the American President tries to convince his Soviet counterpart that the attack was unintended, the Russian Premier sheepishly tells him about the secret doomsday machine. Now the two leaders can do nothing but watch in dismay as the world is blown up due to a game-theoretic mistake.