[roosterdawn]

> Does that mean the US needs needs to be authoritarian now too? No thanks.

I think that the concern you touched upon is essentially the lose-lose quagmire that we as a country arrived at during the onset of the cold war, a war that I believe never truly ended. To answer your question: the problem with mutually assured destruction doctrine is that it necessarily results in an arms race that no superpower can pull out of. Sadly, I question whether a country can be a superpower without also trending more in the authoritarian direction.