There's this great film called Fail Safe, which is about a mechanical failure potentially leading into nuclear war between the USSR and the US.
One of the characters is a political economy professor, who is also the lead strategist for US nuclear doctrine. And he constantly pushes these kinds of takes on the people who take decisions. "Nuclear war isn't so bad", "We can survive it", "We should unleash everything right now because we can win this".
Bear in mind, that movie (and the novel it's based on) got made in the 60's. These crazies have been around for a long time in the West. They are the fanatic lunatics who think that American-led capitalism should reign supreme in the world. Everything else is anathema and should be annihilated. The difference is that, in these current times, they don't just hold positions of power, but they are largely faced with a desensitized public, that actually takes their lunacy as serious discourse.
I am once again going to say Americans haven't experienced actual war in centuries and we should have it inflicted upon us so we stop having these dumbfuck takes.
Is threat of violence against the Neo-Liberal doctrine and the contradicting claim that Liberal ideology somehow ended the Cold War (Fukuyama, The End of History)?
