It is easy to appreciate how an American president, even the most conscientious, would be impaled on the horns of the intractable nuclear security dilemma. By all indications, the nuclear security dilemma should be resolved by assuring reciprocal cooperation backed by potential devastating retaliation, in keeping with the classical liberal adage of war for war and peace for peace. However, rational strategists considered the threat to harm millions of innocent people once deterrence had already failed to be both immoral and irrational. In 1978, Gregory Kavka, who contributed the most rigorous philosophical analysis of this problem at that time, had little to offer President Jimmy Carter to place the strategy of mutual assured destruction on firm ground, save that he should leave the role of issuing credible deterrent threats to agents who were either less than moral or less than rational with the hope they would never be carried out. In 1980, Kavka renewed his efforts to defend the minimum deterrence of MAD against the countervailing war-fighting posture of NUTS. He recommended that the United States should disambiguate its intentions from those characterized in the Prisoner's Dilemma model of the nuclear security dilemma and arms race by clearly demonstrating the intention to cooperatively avoid nuclear war.