...World War I was a railroad war. It was a war for which the general staffs of the four great continental powers had spent decades planning meticulous timetables. The war plans were literally cast in concrete in the sense that governments build railroads according to the requirements of the war plan. One could look at a nation's railroads and get a very accurate idea of what its war plans were. All nations except Britain had very large numbers of trained reserves available that were quite different from the kind of manpower we refer to as reserves today; the 1914 conscripts were prepared to be mobilized into fighting armies. As soon as they were called to the colors, most of them could march to battle on an equal footing with the best troops available. This ability to increase one's force by a large factor and in a very short period of time gave disastrous instability to the situation, because it promised to give the nation that mobilized first a crucial advantage.
—On Thermonuclear War
by Herman Kahn, Evan Jones
First published in 1960 by the Princeton University Press
Excerpt taken from the Transaction Publishers Edition (2007), p. 359