A fraction of what a third world war would have cost in terms of everything from equipment to rebuilding not to mention lives saved had nuclear armaments not been developed by all main parties.
LET'S TAKE A MOMENT TO CONSIDER A DEEP GRATITUDE WE ALL OWE TO A LARGELY UNKNOWN RUSSIAN GENERAL, STANISLAV PETROV ... I LIKE TO CELEBRATE HIM FOR SO ADMIRABLY EARNING THE TITLE OF "THE MAN WHO SAVED THE WORLD"... Stanislav Petrov, a little-known Russian General whose courageous decision in September 1983, (although it put his own life at extreme risk from his Soviet bosses), almost certainly averted a full-scale, worldwide nuclear war. He died on May 19, 2017 in Fryazino, Russia at 77. He is indisputably the man who saved more lives than anyone in history... Here's his inspiring story... As a lieutenant colonel in the Soviet Air Defense Forces, Petrov was on duty Sept. 26, 1983, when the Russian early-warning satellite system he was monitoring detected what appeared to be five approaching U.S. nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missiles looking like they were going to hit their targets in a matter of minutes... Petrov was faced with a critical choice that had to be made immediately: treat the warning as a false alarm or alert his superiors, who would've launched a counterattack. This would have been considered a sneak 1st-use- attack and our response would have been to launch the vast majority of our nukes... The Soviets would've responded back with every nuke in their arsenals around the world... Petrov went with a false alarm, later explaining he reasoned that if the United States really were to start a nuclear war, it would do so with more than five missiles. He was correct. The satellites had mistaken the reflection of the sun off clouds for attacking missiles. Petrov’s decision was all the more remarkable because it occurred during a particularly tense period in the US-Russian relationship. It was only shortly after the Soviet Union had shot down a civilian Korean jetliner (named 007, )that had passed over its territory, killing all 269 passengers and crew. Rather than being praised, Petrov was demoted and reprimanded for allegedly faulty documentation during the key moments. (Mostly likely it because the Soviet leaders who valued loyalty above all else were afraid of a courageous man willing to sacrifice himself to do the right thing... Soviet officials treated the incident as a secret, which it remained until well after the collapse of the Soviet Union. In recent years, Petrov received international praise, earning the 2013 Dresden Peace Prize and a 2006 award from the Association of World Citizens. A 2014 documentary, “The Man Who Saved the World,” told his story. In response to news of Petrov’s death, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) tweeted, “Times of nuclear tension call for careful restraint. You may not know Stanislav Petrov, but at the height of the Cold War, he saved the world.”-ALICIA SANDERS-ZAKRE
I had no idea France tested that many nukes. Considering their vastly smaller military budget compared to the USSR and the USA, it's incredible that they had the funding to build over 200 nukes just for testing purposes, especially when they didn't really need nukes since they were already under the USA and UK's nuclear umbrella.
