Please ignore the very early stages of the competition, let's start when at least one side claimed to have enough nukes to wipe out the other. Examples of scenarios I can think of are:
Was there ever a time during this period in which one side didn't actually have the response capability they claimed, but made it seem like they did?
Was there a time when one side could have eliminated the threat of a retaliatory response but didn't know they could pull it off?
Were one sides weapons systems actually later found to be faulty, and a significant number would have failed?
Was there a brief period where one side had enough nukes to make a war "winnable" while the other side only had a few?
Any scenarios you can think of.
Please correct me if my thoughts on the early stages of the cold war are incorrect.
Thanks!
The Soviet Union would have had no capability for a nuclear retaliation to the continental United States until around 1960. Between 1950 and then it was capable of striking European targets only. It is unlikely that they would have done so unless directly threatened, because they had very limited capability in comparison with the United States (who not only had 10X the nuclear arsenal, but had forward bomber bases surrounding the entire country). So if the US had used nuclear weapons in Korea, for example, the odds of a Soviet nuclear retaliation are basically nil (MAD is not why the US did not use nukes there).
Now the US did often over-estimate Soviet capabilities and probably could have pulled off a first-strike attack even in the 1960s if they had been willing to risk it. But it would have been a risk. (As well as being the sort of thing that would have alienated world opinion pretty bitterly.)
As for faults — it is not clear how many US or Soviet missiles would have actually reached their targets in the early 1960s. Both sides had considerable error rates and large amounts of inaccuracies. Both compensated for this by making huge numbers of missiles. But some systems were particularly terrible, e.g. the Snark missile system of which something like a third would probably not get off the ground, and of those that got off the ground, few would hit anywhere near their targets.
The US had a very dominant nuclear lead over the Soviets, in terms of warheads and delivery systems, until the 1970s. By the 1960s the Soviets had enough of a capability that it would have created some unacceptable losses in the US, but they likely lacked true ability to destroy the US completely as a nation. The US by contrast could destroy the USSR several times over in this time. By the 1970s, a parity had been achieved.
If you are interested in this sort of thing, Eric Schlosser's Command and Control is a great book to read. We tend to think of the Cold War as a time of near perfect parity and reasonably reliable technology, but this was not the case for much of it.