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Speaking of Armageddon...
Kudos go again to Wikipedia, without which I may never heard of Able Archer 83, considered by some to be the closest the world got to nuclear war since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. Having quite vivid memories of what the world was like at the time, I'm amazed the government was up to such shenanigans. Everyone with nukes was pointing them at each other, finger on trigger, safety off. Both sides were engaging in such damned fool things for so long it's a wonder any of us are here at all.
The article does point out there's actually quite limited evidence for such an alarmist Soviet response. However, I've been doing quite a lot of reading about the first and second generations of Soviet revolutionaries, and such a paranoiac reaction was completely within their character. Can't say it happened, but can't say it didn't either.
These stories make me realize how important it was for both sides in the Cold War to be made up of individuals who, despite their ideologies, were willing to risk censure, execution, and even dying in a preemptive nuclear attack, to seize upon even the faintest hope of avoiding a nuclear war.
And now we're being told by our "intellectual betters" that we need to give nukes to a group of people who want to kill everyone else so much that they don't care if they or their children die to kill even a single kuffar, because democracy needs to be "balanced" with dictatorships. "Don't worry, nukes will force them to drop the fanaticism and moderate their stances!"
Just like Hitler's election was supposed to force the Nazi party to moderate their stance.
Come to think of it, has Hamas moderated their stance any, now that they were elected and now run the Palestinian government? Talk about history repeating itself.
I guess we really have no choice but to give them nukes. There is no chance the "intellectual betters" will ever appreciate anything the US has given them, until it all gets wiped away in a couple thousand mushroom clouds.