Hmm interesting got any references?
"It was from the RAND study that the false rumor started, claiming that the ARPANET was somehow related to building a network resistant to nuclear war. This was never true of the ARPANET, only the unrelated RAND study on secure voice considered nuclear war. However, the later work on Internetting did emphasize robustness and survivability, including the capability to withstand losses of large portions of the underlying networks"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET#Misconceptions_of_desig...
It wasn't. That's a common misconception. The Internet Protocol was designed to be a simple, easy to route protocol that would push computational load towards the edge of the network and away from its center. Resistance to damage wasn't a design consideration.