I've been watching this madness for the past fifty years and I think that Caitlin's essay hits the problem right on the head. The one thing she left out is the timing of such errors. During the sixties, the flight time of an ICBM was about half-an-hour. That allowed our "enemies" time to determine whether the attack was real or a malfunction of some sort. Just reading about the events you can follow the effort to see how much time it took to learn that the attack was not happening. Today, with U.S. offensive weapons located on Russia's borders, the flight time is now a very few minutes and leaves almost zero time to decide whether an attack is real or not. Our unrelenting hostility to countries around the world may very well have set the stage for our own nation's suicide.