The Internet was not designed to persist during a nuclear war.:
5 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.
(ARPANET was "an internet", a network-of-networks. It grew to become the pre-eminent internet now known as The Internet.)
...and $4 BTC? Pah, get off my lawn! It took me 4 days to mine my first 50 BTC with a CPU, and they were only worth $0.10! I kinda forgot about Bitcoin after that, until Slashdot ran
a story about Dollar-parity ("OMG! How can magic internet money be worth more than the Dollar? It's unpossible!").
If that's true then where's the proof that the Internet would not survive a war? It's kind of dumb to argue whether the Internet was designed to survive wars or not when what really matters is if it actually would survive a war or not. And the stuff you quoted yourself indicates that
the later work on Internetting did emphasize robustness and survivability, including the capability to withstand losses of large portions of the underlying networks. So WTF dude?
And you just admitted that
you kinda forgot about Bitcoin after that.

It says everything about you. Satoshi invents the greatest technology after Internet and you kind of forget about it. Just STFU and leave, you're embarrassing yourself.
You said, and I quote, "Besides, the Internet was designed to persist during war." It wasn't, that's a common misconception. Persistence during war wasn't a design consideration. A separate study into voice-communications by the RAND corporation looked at using packet-switching for persistent during an exchange of nuclear weapons - that's where the misconception comes from. Whether or not the Internet might survive such an exchange is academic, unless you'd like to revise your "Besides, the Internet was designed to persist during war. " to "Besides, the Internet might persist during war".
Love the Satoshi stuff, keep it coming.