He said under 270 people in three countries hold the actual decisions
Still playing out
Paulson 1978 — fewer than 270 people decide for the US, USSR and China
OPEN
The call: Paulson, 1978: 'The total number of key leaders to control in the U.S. is less than 200. In the U.S.S.R. the problem is even simpler, because the number of key people who control the destiny of the Soviet Union is only 50. In China the number is only 20.'
What happened: Nothing settles this either way. There is no agreed definition of a 'key leader' and no register of one, so the claim has no test attached to it. Held open rather than scored.
He counted the people who really decide things at under two hundred in America, fifty in the Soviet Union and twenty in China. The 270 total is arithmetic on his three numbers, not a figure he wrote. There is no list of who counts as one of those people and no way to check it, so this stays open rather than being marked right or wrong.
The engine's record — word for word
Paulson 1978, scan lines 8608-8610, quoted in full in the source list on his node. The combined figure of about 270 is derived by addition from his three numbers; he never states a total. Scored OPEN because no operational definition of 'key leader' exists to test it against. Recorded here because the same move — a very small controlling set, named as a count rather than as people — recurs in the MindWar material and in the later cognitive-warfare doctrine nodes.
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