M.A.D.: Mutual Assured Destruction (Modern Plays)

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To go after cities, if deterrence should fail, to my mind would be suicidal. It wasn’t just a question of damage-limiting; I believed—and still do—that a counterforce doctrine and posture of sufficient scope would persuade the Soviet Union that it could not count on achieving a military victory in a nuclear exchange. This would assure effective deterrence. For the most part, nuclear deterrence has worked, says Ryan. During the Cold War, Russia and the US were careful to fight only proxy wars, never taking each other on directly. “Someone once described it to me as a bar fight, where the two biggest blokes punch everyone else except each other,” Ryan recalls.

Although mutually assured destruction is likely only a term familiar to military strategists, the phenomenon has important implications for regular people’s lives. Most simply, it helps keep us alive. Unfortunately, nations don’t seem to trust one another enough to live peacefully without the threat of weapons, which makes mutually assured destruction necessary. It is a unique brand of trust based on knowing the other nation will not do anything because they too will suffer in the end. When disagreements occur between political leaders, nuclear deterrence means that hopefully, no nation will choose to unleash the devastation weapon. Campbell Craig and Sergey Radchenko, "MAD, not Marx: Khrushchev and the nuclear revolution." Journal of Strategic Studies (2018) 41#1/2:208-233. a b Jervis, Robert (2021), Bartel, Fritz; Monteiro, Nuno P. (eds.), "The Nuclear Age", Before and After the Fall: World Politics and the End of the Cold War, Cambridge University Press, pp.115–131, doi: 10.1017/9781108910194.008, ISBN 978-1-108-90677-7, S2CID 244858515 To help discourage Soviet communist expansion, the United States built more atomic weaponry. But in 1949, the Soviets tested their own atomic bomb, and the Cold War nuclear arms race was on.Shermer, M. (2014, June 1). Will Mutual Assured Destruction Continue to Deter Nuclear War? Scientific American. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/will-mutual-assured-destruction-continue-to-deter-nuclear-war/

And several inventors — including Richard Gatling, the inventor of the Gatling gun; Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite; and Nikola Tesla, who hoped to develop particle beam weapons — suggested their weapons would make annihilation of each side inevitable and put an end to war as a consequence. Webb, Rachel; Connolly, Erin; Gott, Jessica; Hadfield, Zach; Hamel, Michael; Heimer, Brandon W.; Kattan, Ari; Kirkegaard, Marie C.; Kuhns, Ryan; Maloney, Jillian; Mascaro, Anthony D. (2019). "Defensive Satellites:: Who Will Shoot First?". On the Horizon: 190–199. The Mountain and the Wolf: Tyrion thinks the arrival of the Red Priests will solve their problem since they can just kill the Wolf with their magic. The Red Priest has to tell him that doing so will turn the killer over to Chaos, and the last thing they want is a sorcerer leading the invasion. Not that it's entirely foolproof, since the Wolf is seen to use an Anti-Magic collar when gearing up for what he hopes will be a great battle. Toning Up the Nuclear Triad". Time. 1985-09-23. Archived from the original on March 7, 2008 . Retrieved 2010-10-08.

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a b Green, Brendan Rittenhouse (2020). The Revolution that Failed: Nuclear Competition, Arms Control, and the Cold War. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1-108-48986-7. Dorn, Bryan (2005). "THE WEAPONISATION OF SPACE: justification and consequences". New Zealand International Review. 30 (3): 2–5. ISSN 0110-0262. JSTOR 45235390.

The prisoner’s dilemma is a classic philosophical thought experiment that shows why acting in one’s own self-interest often results in worse consequences than working together with others. It provides evidence that mutually assured destruction should be considered when making decisions, as it can benefit both competing parties. The concept of MAD had been discussed in the literature for nearly a century before the invention of nuclear weapons. One of the earliest references comes from the English author Wilkie Collins, writing at the time of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870: "I begin to believe in only one civilizing influence—the discovery one of these days of a destructive agent so terrible that War shall mean annihilation and men's fears will force them to keep the peace." [10] The concept was also described in 1863 by Jules Verne in his novel Paris in the Twentieth Century, though it was not published until 1994. The book is set in 1960 and describes "the engines of war", which have become so efficient that war is inconceivable and all countries are at a perpetual stalemate. [11] [ non-primary source needed] Miller says regulation of nukes has also dropped off. The Trump administration withdrew from the treaty on intermediate-range nukes, designed to limit US and Russia nuclear deployments, as well as the Iran nuclear deal that was set up in 2015 to stop Iran from developing its own nuclear weapons (and which is now being renegotiated by the Biden administration). But if a missile dubbed the “Satan II” and marketed as a way to remove Texas from the map isn’t massive enough, Russia also boasts another doomsday nuke–one said to match or even double the nuclear yield of the Sarmat, while bolstering its destructive capacity by creating an unnatural, natural disaster. The Cold War arms race came to a tipping point in 1962 after the John F. Kennedy administration’s failed attempt to overthrow Cuba’s premier Fidel Castro, and Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev implemented a secret agreement to place Soviet warheads in Cuba to deter future coup attempts.

But the threat of nuclear annihilation remains real. The Federation of American Scientists, a nonprofit founded in 1945 by scientists and engineers who had worked on the Manhattan Project to develop the first nuclear bomb, reports that as of early 2022, about 12,700 nuclear warheads are possessed today by nine countries: the United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, France, China, India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea. Most of them are held by the United States and Russia, which have about 4,000 warheads each. And according to a 2018 scientific study in the journal Safety, that's enough to wipe out almost all of us.

Danilovic, Vesna (2002). When the stakes are high :deterrence and conflict among major powers /. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. p.10. hdl: 2027/mdp.39015056796371. ISBN 978-0-472-11287-6. The atomic bombs that the US unleashed in World War II work through a chain reaction known as nuclear fission – by splitting the atom of isotopes such as uranium and plutonium. During the Cold War, America and Russia made hydrogen bombs thousands of times more powerful than those dropped on Japan using a process known as nuclear fusion which works in reverse – binding together nuclei – in the same way the sun produces energy. (Oppenheimer’s opposition to the development of more powerful bombs later cost him his job.) Modern nuclear bombs use both fission and fusion.

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The Soviet’s launch of the first Sputnik satellite on October 4, 1957, stunned and concerned the United States and the rest of the world, as it took the Cold War arms race soon became the Space Race. An outline of current US nuclear strategy toward both Russia and other nations was published as the document " Essentials of Post–Cold War Deterrence" in 1995. Their high accuracy (low circular error probable), compared to submarine-launched ballistic missiles which used to be less accurate, and more prone to defects;