Horrible indeed. Makes one wonder what the Soviets got up to when the US is supposedly the "good guys".
'Meshcheryakov, the Soviet physicist, like all of the international observers, was not allowed to see any more than the reporters. But he still saw much. The mushroom clouds from Able and Baker interested him some, but he was more taken with what he saw in the people around him. The Americans, he told Moscow, were not in any way interested in disarmament. Rather, they were training their armed forces to integrate nuclear weapons into their military doctrine.'
Of course, disarmament doesn't really make sense: once science has discovered something, it can't be undiscovered. Integrating every new discovery into one's doctrine (even if that integration is, 'we'd rather not') is far more mature than pretending something doesn't exist.
Curtis LeMay (IIRC) stated that those two were by far the preferable options: but failing those, it was imperative that the US had "the best, the biggest, and the most".
If you look at the relative size of the two armies and (especially) the size of the tank corps, you'll understand why that was.
The United States wasn't about to give up nukes if it meant its interests in Europe would be at the mercy of a massive Soviet tank invasion.
> "The Americans, he told Moscow, were not in any way interested in disarmament. Rather, they were training their armed forces to integrate nuclear weapons into their military doctrine."
As others have pointed out, this is only a surface-level interpretation of what was going on.