Probably the most authoritative statement out there is at http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/200003/msg0008... I quote:
So the motivation for Paul's work was to provide a minimal but highly survivable one-way communications arrangement to get out the go-code; it was NOT motivated by a requirement for a survivable command-control system that could support the forces fully in both peace and in war.
That's from Willis Ware, who was in the management structure at RAND at the time. But Baran's own attitude is a bit different. Here's quote from Abbate's "Inventing the Internet": on page 1 of the introduction to his 1960 paper describing a survivable communications system Baran explicitly characterized his proposed network as a tool for recovering from?rather than forestalling?a nuclear war: "The cloud-of-doom attitude that nuclear war spells the end of the earth is slowly lifting from the minds of the many?. It follows that we should?do all those things necessary to permit the survivors of the holocaust to shuck their ashes and reconstruct the economy swiftly." The cited paper is Reliable Digital Communications Systems Using Unreliable Network Repeater Nodes. Report P-1995, Rand Corporation; I haven't been able to find it online. --Steven M. Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb