[ZhuanXia]

The historical context for that statement is it was made when America had a monopoly on nuclear weapons and Stalin's Soviet Union, a dictatorship of incomparable authoritarianism and delusion, was on the cusp of developing such weapons. Few would have predicted that a nuclear war would not occur once that happened. Under these circumstances, a first strike followed by occupation may have been rational. And given the complete insanity, cruelty and dehumanizing brutality of Soviet policy in the following 50 years, it's possible American occupation of the Soviet union would have saved many lives on net. See East vs West Berlin, for example. His position on first-strike was not very irrational given what was known at the time. Even in hindsight, it is hard to say either way.

[nl]

It's a good thing that decisions to massacre hundreds of millions of people isn't made like this, then.

Many highly rational people get sucked into making decisions merely on math, ignoring the ethical aspects. Ironically, on HN that decision making process is often mirrored and so discussions tend to fall into the same trap.

[yongjik]

You know, that's pretty much exact same argument for liberating those poor Iraqis, let's see how well it went.

(Except that liberating Russians would have gone a whole lot worse. You would end up liberating half of Eastern Europe, and probably the whole Germany, along the way.)