I haven't read the book, but I thought, who knew that Obama's original campaign manager had written on nuclear war? But I Googled and saw this was Daniel Axelrod. Anyway.

I can't speak to the book as I haven't seen it. But in terms of first-strike attacks, the US long-sought (and arguably still seeks, in more subtle ways), the possibility of a first-strike attack. The logic of it is not too surprising: nobody wants a nuclear war, the official will tell you, but if it seems like it's going to happen anyway, isn't it their responsibility to try and see if it's possible to just contain it to one nation, and not both? Which is to say, arguing for a possible first-strike ability is not necessarily the same thing as arguing for preemptive attack, though there have been people who have advocated for the latter (though mostly in the pre-1970s period, before the Soviets had achieved nuclear parity with the USA).

Did the Soviets worry about this? Oh, yes, indeed. The Pershing IIs, for example, scared them mightily in the early 1980s, because their proximity and speed meant that the Soviets would have mere seconds to respond. And they worried that they might get stuck with a dud leader at that time (e.g., late Brezhnev, sick Andropov, or Chernenko) who might not be capable of responding rapidly or intelligently. This is why they built their infamous Systema Perimetr, known as the "Dead Hand" in the West, which basically allowed the Premier to put retaliation on "full auto" if they thought an attack might be coming soon. Basically the Premier would authorize the generals to activate the system if they thought it was necessary, and once activated a missile bunker in the middle of the USSR would need to maintain constant contact with Moscow. If contact was broken, they were to assume Moscow was gone, and launch a missile that carried a radio transmitter on it. This radio missile would then broadcast the codes that would authorize nuclear strikes across the country, insuring a rapid response.

The Soviets were so spooked about this in the early 1980s that they had a program, Project RYAN, whose entire purpose was to monitor Western communications and economic indicators for any sign that the war was starting. It was, in retrospect, a very dangerous position: they were searching for patterns in noise, with very high stakes attached to it.

The Chinese have taken a different policy, on the whole, which is to say, they aspire purely for a second-strike attack. They know the US and USSR (who were also not their pals) could nuke them many times over. So they buried their nuclear weapons in caves and silos with the hope that their difficulty of disabling would keep alive the possibility of a retaliatory strike, small but potent, thus maintaining deterrence even if they were not at parity.

Some things to read if you are interested:

• For a more up-to-date take on US war plans and dangers, I find Eric Schlosser's Command and Control to be a great read and a great all-in-one sort of book. I would recommend it over something written in the late 1980s — not because the latter is necessarily bad, but because we've learned a lot more about the Soviet side of things since then, and because things were arguably a bit overheated during the Reagan years with regards to nuclear rhetoric.

• For information specifically about the 1980s, the "Dead Hand," the Pershing IIs, Project RYAN, etc., see David Hoffman's The Dead Hand.

• For China, Jeffrey Lewis' Paper Tigers: China's Nuclear Posture does a great job of describing the history of the Chinese nuclear program and what we know about how they view nuclear strategy.