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That was the point. Back then phone communication needed a dedicated circuit from start to end. Blow up Detroit and not only will none of the phones in Detroit work, but no one in Chicago can Call new York.
ARPNET introduced switched packets that could be routed. So blow up Detroit and folks in Chicago could still talk to New York, but via Toronto.
That was not its intention, and, given the number of strategic warheads the Russians could deploy back then, it is unlikely that it would have worked. Sure military bunkers and silos would be mostly OK but everything else would be pretty much trashed.
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Although the ARPANET was designed to survive subordinate-network losses, the principal reason was that the switching nodes and network links were unreliable, even without any nuclear attacks. About the resources scarcity that spurred the creation of the ARPANET, Charles Herzfeld, ARPA Director (1965–1967), said:
The ARPANET was not started to create a Command and Control System that would survive a nuclear attack, as many now claim. To build such a system was, clearly, a major military need, but it was not ARPA’s mission to do this; in fact, we would have been severely criticized had we tried. Rather, the ARPANET came out of our frustration that there were only a limited number of large, powerful research computers in the country, and that many research investigators, who should have access to them, were geographically separated from them.