Here is from Daniel Ellsberg’s 2017 The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner, about what insiders know and don’t honestly tell the U.S. President about what a nuclear war would do:

On page 1 of Ellsberg’s book, he said that the only “For the President’s Eyes Only” document he ever saw was in 1961, from the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, for President Kennedy, whose question to them had been: “If your plans for general [nuclear] war are carried out as planned, how many people will be killed in the Soviet Union and China?” The estimate he got back from them was around 300 million within six months. Plus there would be at least another 100 million deaths elsewhere in Europe and Asia. (But Kennedy hadn’t asked about that.) Ellsberg says (p. 72) he knew, even at that time, that it would be “in reality, a lot more than that” 400 million within six months. (It wasn’t until 2007 that scientific analyses started to be made public regarding what a “general war” of this sort would do: and that — and how — it would destroy our planet’s biosphere. Of course, any such analyses that might have been done for the U.S. Government itself were never published, and still have not been published. Obviously, the U.S. Government doesn’t want the public to know — just as, in 1961, they didn’t want even the U.S. President to know.)

On page 89, he wrote that:

Many operations and plan centers and command posts in Okinawa, Formosa, Guam, and Tokyo, and on several carriers and command ships in the Pacific that I visited, had a large map showing nuclear targets. It was their most secret map, usually covered by a screen or curtain when people who lacked authorization (unlike me) were being briefed in the room. These maps, typically, did not demarcate at all between China and Russia. The Sino-Soviet bloc appeared as one giant landmass, with arrows and pins indicating the various targets. You could not tell simply by inspecting the pins whether they were in China or Russia. On some maps, local planners had pinned a piece of colored string indicating roughly the boundary between Russia and China. This meant that a high-level planner in that division, faced with orders to strike one country but not the other, could not, just by inspecting those targets, decide reliably which ones to pull. …

Furthermore, on actual runways I visited, … there was no routine for only the China-targeted planes to launch, or only the Russia-targeted planes. The pilots themselves generally did not know which country they were targeting, … [but] only coordinates. …

All these factors combined to create a situation in which, if we were under attack, it would be simply physically impossible to retaliate against Russian or Chinese targets alone, even if the president ordered his forces to do so.

When JFK came into office in 1961 immediaely after the fraudulent opponent, but actual supporter, of America’s military-industrial complex, Dwight Eisenhower, President Kennedy had to deal with a number of mines that his two predecessors — Truman and Eisenhower — had laid for him and which ended up producing Kennedy’s assassination and the war in Vietnam. Truman had started the Cold War on 25 July 1945 mainly under the influence of his personal hero, who was the subterranean Rhodesist* General Dwight Eisenhower. Kennedy’s brief Presidency was a quick succession of emergencies that were caused by what Eisenhower and Truman had refused to do in domestic policy, and also by what they had insisted on, and demanded to be done, in international policy (the Cold War, which wasn’t really against communism, but instead for global hegemony by the U.S. — the world’s first-ever all-encompassing global empire): the country following after Truman and Eisenhower was an enormous ship that when Kennedy became its steersman was set to crash into icebergs of evil that no one had warned the young President about until after those crashes hit and left America, from then on, doomed to decline, while the MIC would rise and ultimately swallow it up, and perhaps (if we go into WW III) destroy the entire world.

Truman despised the anti-imperialist FDR — replaced his entire cabinet within two years — and his hero was General Eisenhower, whom he told his wife Bess on 19 June 1945 “They are running him for President, which is OK with me. I’d turn it over to him now if I could.” Then, on 25 July 1947, he wrote into his diary, “I told Ike that … he (Ike) should announce for the nomination for President on the Democratic ticket and that I’d be glad to be in second place, or Vice President.” The cunning Ike’s hagiographer, Stephen E. Ambrose, said that Ike had turned the offer down because he “wanted nothing to do with the Democratic Party,” but instead it was because the polling showed Truman to be very unpopular and Ike was hoping to get a cleaner shot to win, without having to burden himself with such an unpopular person as his number two on the ticket.

As anyone who looks at the evidence knows, today’s U.S. Government still has the ultimate objective to capture or eliminate both Russia and China, and perhaps the only way that either of those nations will be able to survive instead of to become absorbed into the U.S. empire will be for both of them to merge into and become one country (much like they always have been in the nuclear-war planning of the U.S. Government). If they would be invaded that way, they should defend themselves that way. Truman, Ike, and Nixon, were remarkably similar; Kennedy was an odd man out, and was the only U.S. President following FDR who — but for all the others — would have at least struggled to move forward with the anti-imperialistic and other progressive policies that FDR had planned for post-WW-II America.

So: we now know that what America currently has is not (like the agents of Republican billionaires like to pump) “America versus China” versus (like the agents of Democratic billionaires like to pump) “America versus Russia”; but, INSTEAD, is actually: “America versus both China and Russia” (i.e., to conquer both of the two chief targets of all of America’s billionaires). It’s even worse than the ‘historians’ know and understand it to be.

* Churchill was consciously a follower of his teacher, Rhodes, and became Eisenhower’s teacher in Rhodesist imperialism. Whereas the serpentine Ike said that colonialism must end and then hypocritically created American colonialism in 1953 in Iran, 1954 in Guatemala, and elsewhere, Churchill simply and more honestly (as a Rhodesist) argued “I am a bit skeptical about universal suffrage for the Hottentots” and he openly said “I think I will stick with the old one [Rhodes’s advocated form of racism], ‘The Unity of the English-Speaking Peoples’ [that he had personally learned from Rhodes]. With that, all will work out well.” Ike had to be more hypocritical about it, because he pretended to be a follower of America’s Constitution, which rejected imperialism. Truman was strongly influenced by both Churchill and Ike. That created today’s Rhodesist U.S. Government, at Potsdam, on 25 July 1945, when both Churchill and Ike persuaded Truman to commence the Cold War for U.S. global hegemony.