This is not a serious discussion. Anyone who believes that a new, UNELECTED, President could reverse the long-held policy of his Sainted predecessor and attack our biggest ally with nuclear weapons can hardly call ME "daft".
You are also apparently unaware of the Soviet/Russian peoples' capacity for suffering. We could not have killed enough of them to win without turning into the monsters we claimed to be fighting.
Cynics and Machiavellians may be able to rationalize this grab for power but it would have been totally inconsistent with the nature of the American people who had to be dragged into the world arena of power politics.
Less than three decades before America was so isolationist that the Senate rejected the League of Nations. We deliberately turned our backs on European politics until it became so dangerous involvement was unavoidable. Now it would be ready to rule the world through military power? I don't think so.
"This is not a serious discussion."
You're right and it is because of your failure to understand the misery that resulted by outr inaction.
This inaction resulted in the Kremlin and China getting the bomb and putting a billion people in slavery and another 60 million in their graves.
What part of this don't you understand?
Do you know waht it cost us to contain this vermin once they had the bomb?
And the final chapter is not yet written.
In the mid 1940s, the US had a very intuitive sense of suffering which lingered from the southerners after the Civil War and reinforced by the Great Depression and their endurance through WWII. Victory doesn't imply defeat, except for the whorehouse operator in Joseph Heller's Catch-22.