War

From the nuclear war satire"Doctor Strangelove":

General "Buck" Turgidson: Mr. President, we are rapidly approaching a moment of truth both for ourselves as human beings and for the life of our nation. Now, truth is not always a pleasant thing. But it is necessary now to make a choice, to choose between two admittedly regrettable, but nevertheless *distinguishable*, postwar environments: one where you got twenty million people killed, and the other where you got a hundred and fifty million people killed.

President Merkin Muffley: You're talking about mass murder, General, not war!

General "Buck" Turgidson: Mr. President, I'm not saying we wouldn't get our hair mussed. But I do say no more than ten to twenty million killed, tops. Uh, depending on the breaks.

And now we hear what real American war planners thought in the 1960s:

Daniel Ellsberg ("Pentagon Papers" scandal) asked, "If your plans… are carried out as planned… how many people will die in the USSR and China?"

The answer was in the form of a chart… rising over six months because radioactive fallout would increase the deaths… 325 million people if we struck first…

Another 100 million would be killed in the captive nations [Soviet-linked nations in Eastern Europe]… from their [US] air defences attacks on those air bases… And then another 100 million in contiguous areas… like Afghanistan, Austria, Finland, Japan… from radioactive fallout.

The whistleblower also heard what the expected death toll would be for US allies in Europe:

And without another warhead landing on West Europe, naturally, from our attack, 100 million of our allies would be killed by radioactive fallout from East Europe and the Soviet Union, depending on which way the wind blew…

But that added up then to 600 million, or 100 holocausts.

Meanwhile, Ellsberg said the USSR at the time had the ability to “annihilate” Western Europe, which it would likely do in the event of a US attack.

It gets worse:

The US, however, didn’t include how many further deaths would result from the fires its nuclear bombs created. It also didn’t include how many people would die because of the smoke, which would cause a ‘nuclear winter’. Ellsberg says the smoke, which would block much of the sun and kill all the harvests, would last a decade or more.

And although Ellsberg asked the question in the 1960s, he said:

"People have now told me, who are insiders on the plan, quite authoritatively, the plans have never reflected this, never taken [smoke] into account any more than they take fire into account, which means that our own attack… would kill nearly everyone…"