Back in the '70s I attended a speech given by some talking head about the nuclear confrontation we had with Russia.
One person asked him what about China setting off a nuclear explosion on either side in order to start a war between Russia and the U.S.
The guy stunned everyone in the audience (some gasped), when he said "The first bomb is free." WTF????
He said both sides were aware of tactics like that, or even of accident, and had basically come to that conclusion. The Russians pointed to a situation outside of Stalingrad, where rebuilding was going on, and a bulldozer uncovered an abandoned German ammo dump. They said it was the equivalent explosive power of the Hiroshima bomb and had the bulldozer hit a shell the wrong way, over 20K tons of high explosives would have gone up.
I was glad to see that cool heads prevailed.
“The first is free”
Wow. I guess, on the bright side, it wasn’t “Buy one, get one free.”