I infer you've never lived in one of America's colonial vassal states. Both empires probably had to treat their subject populations a bit better in the presence of a geopolitical alternative.

> Both empires probably had to treat their subject populations a bit better in the presence of a geopolitical alternative.

That's not quite sane: you're (1) placing this as an alternative to a full out nuclear war, and (2) placing the US' and the USSR's influence at equal footing.

I infer you didn't experience the hot war that would have been, if the US had a nuclear monopoly! Curtis LeMay was seriously pushing for using the US nuclear arsenal on multiple occasions, including against Moscow and in Vietnam. He pushed for this even knowing that there was a near certainty of nuclear retaliation. How influential do you think his voice would have been without MAD?

> would have been

Why? I guess the Vietnamese communists would have surrendered to the US and the country would have lived under its influence instead of the Soviets', and that's assuming Ho Chi Min would have received enough support in the first place. There's no reason to assume the US would have nuked at someone's whim.

BTW, the French and the Brits also have their nuclear arsenal. There would not have been a "monopoly".

This isn't just "someone's whim", but the Air Force chief of staff, the guy entrusted with the authority to make such recommendations.

See here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_LeMay

> Towards this aim, LeMay delivered the first SAC Emergency War Plan in March 1949 which called for dropping 133 atomic bombs on 70 cities in the USSR within 30 days. [...] Air power strategists called this type of pre-emptive strike "killing a nation". However, the Harmon committee released their unanimous report two months later stating such an attack would not end a war with the Soviets and their industry would quickly recover. This committee had been specifically created by the Joint Chiefs of Staff to study the effects of a massive nuclear strike against the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, within weeks, an ad hoc Joint Chiefs committee recommended tripling America's nuclear arsenal, and Chief of Staff Vandenberg called for enough bombs to attack 220 targets, up from the previous 70.

Note that March 1949 was 5 months before the USSR's first atomic bomb test.

It's not a leap to suggest that if the USSR didn't obtain nuclear weapons in 1949, the US would have shown much less restraint than they did. And "restraint" is already not the first word that comes to mind to describe American foreign policy in the 20th century. (As for France and the UK, I don't think the US president would have worried about the UK nuking Washington in retaliation for a pre-emptive nuclear strike on the USSR).