But MAD was a radical departure that trumped the conventional view of war. The age of MAD heralded a new fear, with citizens knowing that they could be annihilated within a matter of minutes at the touch of a button several thousands of miles away.
Apart from the fear that one side would do something stupid, there was also the fear of technology and the question of 'what if an accident happened'. In the end both superpowers gave ground and the problem was averted but mankind had never come so close to doomsday.
Following a period of Cold War detente in the s, tension rose again in the s. By this point the Soviet Union had many more warheads, and it was commonly said that there were enough nuclear arms on Earth to wipe the planet out several times. The fear of impending attack became a part of everyday conversation. Children speculated in the playground about the first signs of a nuclear attack - hair and fingernails falling out - and whether one could survive a nuclear winter.
In there were a number of Russian false alarms. In the same year, Nato's military planning operation Able Archer led some Russian commanders to conclude that a Nato nuclear launch was imminent.
Sometimes the black humour emanated from unlikely places. In President Ronald Reagan famously said in a radio soundcheck: "My fellow Americans, I'm pleased to tell you today that I've signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes. The authorities tried to offer reassurance. The mutually assured distrust can cause minority communities to retaliate, which then causes law enforcement to often violently crack down on riots and retaliations.
In order for mutually assured destruction to work, police officers must learn not to abuse their authority. Alternatively, a different tactic that aims at improving the trust and relationship between police officers and racialized individuals needs to be employed. In this article, our writer Justin Fox outlines the evolution of decision-making.
He discusses mutually assured destruction as a response to the revolution of rational decision-making that emerged during the World War II era. There was belief, during this time, that the rational thinking employed by statisticians and mathematicians could be applied to other fields, like warfare.
One of the criticisms against mutually assured destruction as a peacekeeping strategy is that power imbalances — real or perceived — threaten the phenomenon.
In this article, our writer Namrata Raju explores how overconfidence and an inflated sense of power can lead people to launch unprovoked attacks on competitors without fear of retaliation. Mutually Assured Destruction. Theory, meet practice TDL is an applied research consultancy. Key Terms Nuclear Deterrence : A military strategy that uses the threat of retaliation to dissuade a nation from a particular kind of attack.
History On August 6th, , an American pilot dropped the first ever deployed atomic bomb over Hiroshima, Japan, immediately killing 80, people.
Controversies Mutually assured destruction is based on the principle that if a particular weapon is used in an attack, the nation being attacked will be able to retaliate with equal force and destruction. Sources Farnam Street.
Mutually Assured Destruction Quotes. Mutual assured destruction. Nash Equilibrium. Bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. What Is Mutually Assured Destruction? Cuban Missile Crisis. Scientific American. Mutually Assured Distrust. Read Next. Reference Guid. But no country with nuclear weapons has agreed to this timetable.
Some supporters of eventual nuclear disarmament worry about the destabilizing effects of moving quickly. Opponents see more pressing problems , or believe that nuclear weapons have deterred conventional as well as nuclear war.
As such systems decrease to small numbers, the incentives to cheat rise exponentially, as do the risks to non-cheaters. Suppose, for example, that the United States and Russia each reduced their strategic stockpiles to nuclear weapons — in that scenario, hiding an additional 50 would provide a marginal strategic advantage. With such systems each, hiding an additional 50 provides a major strategic advantage, although perhaps not a definitive one, since each party would presumably still have the capacity to utterly destroy the other.
At some point between zero and strategic nuclear weapons each, however, any appreciable cheating would provide an overwhelming advantage. There have been no developments in the realms of politics, strategy, or technology that change this calculus. Consequently, there are no reasons to believe that any current nuclear power is prepared to take the risks necessary in order to achieve complete nuclear disarmament. The objective of mutually assured security is to keep the risk of a nuclear exchange low, while greatly decreasing the consequences should one occur.
It would do this by ensuring that neither side can inflict catastrophic damage on the other. A system of mutually assured security would need to have four important characteristics. First, countries with nuclear weapons would possess low numbers of offensive weapons, each having somewhere between zero and such weapons. Second, those countries would need defensive systems capable of destroying a high proportion of the offensive systems they are aimed at. Third, countries would need to possess substantially larger numbers of defensive than offensive systems, in an agreed proportion.
Fourth, there would need to be an international agreement on the points above, as well as on the following additional matters: how to manage the transition from offensive to defensive deterrence; a freeze on research related to, and improvement of, offensive strategic systems; cooperative research on improving defensive systems; and an extensive and intrusive national and international verification regime. This approach to nuclear deterrence would not entail zero risk — as complete nuclear disarmament ideally would — but it would be low-risk and would dramatically reduce the consequences of deterrence failure.
No rational actor would launch a nuclear attack that is doomed to fail. An irrational actor might, but under mutually assured security the attack would still be doomed to fail, for reasons discussed below.
There are four primary obstacles to making the transition to mutually assured security. In increasing order of difficulty, they are resources, technology, statesmanship, and imagination.
A robust strategic defensive system will be expensive. Expenditures on U. There are no definitive projections of how much it will cost to build a reliable defensive system, although the tens of billions now budgeted will be insufficient. The force that these expenditures will produce will retain its massive overkill capacity while improving the efficiency with which it can be delivered.
On strictly rational grounds, it would be better if all nuclear states allowed their offensive systems to degrade gradually, since a country would be less likely to use them in a first strike if it had doubts about how well they would work. Effective defenses against all elements of the offensive nuclear triad — ground-based ballistic missiles, submarine-launched ballistic missiles, and bombers — will be required, in addition to defenses against cruise missiles.
Second, I wonder now if victory was in fact possible in a nuclear war. This observation contradicts the consensus in the scholarly literature , which holds that the nuclear revolution made the arms race unnecessary and not really all that dangerous. According to this view, which is still widely held today, the condition of MAD should have stabilized international politics , since the requirements of nuclear deterrence were easily met and nearly impossible to overturn.
Because nuclear arsenals remained secure, the cost of war was too high to risk competition. The intense nuclear competition, therefore, was not caused by strategic circumstances, but rather by domestic pathologies, which prevented policymakers in both Washington and Moscow from learning to live with and love the bomb.
Policymakers simply missed the boat when it came to how and why nuclear deterrence worked. In their view, too much uncertainty surrounded the requirements of nuclear deterrence, including the survivability of nuclear forces. They could also not know with enough certainty if the Soviets agreed about the virtues of MAD.
The costs of war would be very high if they were wrong. To illustrate, I recall watching former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld debate proponents of the nuclear revolution about the nature of deterrence at a meeting of the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations. Rumsfeld argued that nuclear deterrence was difficult and not guaranteed, not even in MAD, if such a thing existed.
Perhaps the views of the defense policy luminary Paul Nitze serve as a good snapshot of the Cold War consensus among policymakers about nuclear weapons. Nitze stands out as a unique player in the defense politics of the time, due to his four decades of experience in government under both Republican and Democratic administrations. Throughout his career, Nitze dismissed the deterrent value of MAD. The threat of mutually assured destruction, he felt, lacked the credibility to deter a Soviet attack on NATO or the United States, a concern that was widely shared within the U.
As he explained :. To go after cities, if deterrence should fail, to my mind would be suicidal. This would assure effective deterrence. Similarly, Nitze concluded that only superior nuclear forces would ensure international stability. The nuclear balance, in his view, influenced Soviet global ambitions. He warned ,. I believe that only by maintaining this superiority of strategic and nonstrategic military forces can the United States have the optimum opportunity to use its military power short of war to support its foreign policy or be in a position to win a military victory, at the lowest level of conflict adequate to do the job, if war should, nevertheless, occur.
Prudent policymakers had to hedge and could not rely on MAD to promote peace. And the Silver Fox was not alone. A wide swath of analysts and government officials largely shared his pessimism about MAD.
Air Force, wrestled for decades with the question of how to implement credibly a policy of extended deterrence to NATO under a delicate nuclear balance of terror. Similarly, from the Office of Net Assessment the highly influential Defense Department strategist Andrew Marshall commissioned and conducted studies to investigate how the United States could most effectively compete with the Soviet Union. As the Cold War progressed, U.
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