You buttume it was the nature of the U.S.S.R to sting.
We "dehumanize" our enemies, exactly as you have just done by calling them "scorpions".
Fact is, they were scared to rest of the US as well. Stop and think about this for a moment, if you lived in some other country and there was this huge giant superpower with the A-plant and very little regard for the international community, wouldn't YOU be scared of them.
Suppose you were on the other side of the fence, in that case, the US would be the scorpion.
Since you bring up WWII, I'll chime in by saying the real lesson is not atomic weapons, but to learn about blindly following leaders. It worries me that we don't seem to have learned this important lesson.
In order to actually "see" this lesson you have to step outside the US-Germany borders and think about it from a global perspective.
We will return to those wars again if we refuse to learn the lessons of the past.
We owe our freedoms to great men like Ronald Reagan and Bush Sr. and Gorbachiev(sp) because they DIDN'T resort to planting the other side, they managed to use diplomacy. Had they failed to do this, there would be no freedom because we wouldn't be here.
As far as the whole civil defense thing, sorry, but it would have been pointless.
Jamie