Cold War overproduction of nukes is commonly attributed to fears of a “missile gap,” despite this being obviously farcical. In reality, this was mere cover for the real reasons: the USSR, as the world’s first atheist state, needed a much larger deterrent to keep the angelic legions of heaven at bay, whereas the US’s pioneering work on quantum mechanics led to a tense standoff with dozens of different parallel USSRs that threatened to attack simultaneously.