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There's also a number of nuclear history books that describe early meetings between US and Chinese military officers as very carefree and bombastic until, when wargaming, the Chinese side would give claims for how many casualties that they would proudly sacrifice in defense of their homeland, the US side would bring out then-classified nuclear calculators and give casualty estimates, and the difference between the first numbers and the second numbers would leave everyone at the table in very morbid moods.
I'm not sure how much I trust these claims -- China pledged to no-first-use in 1964, even if Americans (not unreasonably) believed the policy to have some flexibility, those early meetings necessary come from a tiny number of original sources who were more than a little biased.
I'd love a source for the wargaming story if you have one. I don't recall similar stories from my reading of nuclear history books.
From "Nuclear Warfare 101" by Stuart Slade:
An email exchange doesn't strike me as a great source for a claim like this. It would be fantastic if Stuart Slade was an army colonel who participated in this exchange, but I don't know who he is or why he should be an authority on this topic. The email is also written as a retelling of someone else's story rather than like a primary source.
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Thanks. I could have sworn I'd seen a version of it in print, but the closest book I have on the material was Age of Radiance, and it's not in that book.
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