Nuclear strategy and deterrence in their "golden age" -a nostalgically defined period sometime in the mid-1950s to mid-1960s - promised to harness and control the nuclear Moloch; hopes were high that the civilian strategists flooding into Washington would succeed in designing a new science of war that would safeguard national security, provide a stable international environment, and develop a rational decision-making process for the management of national interests in a hostile nuclear world. Three decades later, it is a commonplace that the erstwhile promises and pretensions of the nuclear.