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

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In the middle of the film Ice Station Zebra, this Trope is discussed (" a wonderful acronym, if there ever was one!") as part of the rapid-fire Info Dump that explains why the film's MacGuffin (a surveillance satellite that went down near the titular polar station and which contains on film the precise locations of all the nuclear silos on Russia and North America) is so important: such information would surely allow the enemy to devise a "survivable" battle strategy for an all-out nuclear assault. 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. By the late 1960s, Soviet nuclear forces began to approach parity with the American arsenal. Proponents of the nuclear revolution mark this as the moment when the superpowers began to live in a state of mutually assured destruction. Both countries possessed seemingly secure second-strike forces of such size that, no matter how well they executed a first strike, neither would escape a devastating retaliatory blow. Neither country could limit damage to itself in any appreciable way, no matter what combination of offensive or defensive counterforce capabilities it threw at the problem. For proponents of the theory of the nuclear revolution, this condition would provide the foundation for an uneasy peace, if only the superpowers would embrace it. DELPECH, THÉRÈSE (2012), "Introduction", Nuclear Deterrence in the 21st Century, Lessons from the Cold War for a New Era of Strategic Piracy, RAND Corporation, pp.1–8, ISBN 978-0-8330-5930-7, JSTOR 10.7249/mg1103rc.5 , retrieved 2021-04-02

Mutually Assured Destruction? Game Theory and the Cold War Mutually Assured Destruction? Game Theory and the Cold War

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/ a b Castella, Tom de (2012-02-15). "How did we forget about mutually assured destruction?". BBC News . Retrieved 2017-09-19. Subverted in the lawless Terminus systems, where small states ("small" meaning "only controls one or a few planets") apparently use meteor drops against each other fairly often. They call that 20% of the galaxy the "third galaxy" for a reason. U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev declared in 1985 that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought”, a view that Presidents Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin reiterated in their June 2021 summit meeting. Many American leaders and their top advisers have affirmed the goal of a nuclear-free world, without being able to articulate how to achieve it. Most have supported arms control agreements, while understanding that the agreements neither advanced progress toward nuclear disarmament nor increased the likelihood that the United States would survive a nuclear war. Reagan was the notable exception. His Strategic Defense Initiative, announced in March 1983 and derisively referred to as “Star Wars” by its detractors, intended to provide an alternative to mutually assured destruction. His administration was never able to persuade its Soviet interlocutors that the initiative was more than a unilateral effort to attain a decisive first-strike advantage and they became convinced that less demanding advances in offensive weaponry could counter it.Nuclear fission was first discovered in 1938, and scientists soon theorized that the development of atomic bombs was plausible. After hearing of Nazi plans to develop nuclear weapons, the US began its own research projects. Prudent policymakers had to hedge and could not rely on MAD to promote peace. As Nitze reflected toward the end of the Cold War, “Although some argued that nuclear weapons would radically change the nature of warfare, responsible officials did not hold this view.” Controversy is still prevalent (and doubtless always will be) as to the justification of the bombing. Many scholars debate if it caused or prevented more deaths. However, the big question is not ‘what have we done?’ but ‘what will we do?’ Dropping the first atomic bomb did not just open a macabre Pandora’s box, it also forced humanity to see the possibility that we will destroy ourselves and this entire planet in the process of settling disputes between nations.

Mutually Assured Destruction - The Decision Lab Mutually Assured Destruction - The Decision Lab

But one medium from the Cold War, more than any other, gets through to my students: MTV, Music Television, which cannonballed into America’s cable systems in August 1981. When I show them videos from the age of glitter and spandex that are filled with images of nuclear destruction, they finally grasp how much the threat of instant and final war was woven into the daily life of young Americans who thought they were turning on the television just to tune out the world. The effect was subtle, but real. Nearly 40 years later, I can remember watching MTV with my arm around a girl and having Men at Work’s “ Overkill”—a video about insomnia brought on by fear of an inevitable nuclear war—push its way into my otherwise distracted consciousness. I wasn’t alone; people my age remember those videos, and many of the songs are still with us. On the day in 1945 that Robert A Lewis, copilot of the B-29 Superfortress dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, he wrote six agonizingly poignant words in his log book: “My God, what have we done?” Strategic Air Command Declassifies Nuclear Target List from 1950s". nsarchive.gwu.edu . Retrieved 2016-01-06.

Theory, meet practice

The Revolution that Failed has persuaded me — albeit in an uneasy way — that the United States might have escaped Armageddon in a nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union. However, I do not think the country would have emerged unscathed. The United States would have been better off than proponents of the theory of the nuclear revolution have claimed, but there would have still been plenty of pain to go around. Put another way, Washington might have broken out of MAD only to find itself still in the condition of mutually assured retaliation. A better place, to be sure, but still not free of grave danger. Mushroom clouds were even more common on MTV than the 40th president. In David Bowie’s 1984 “ Let’s Dance” video, Aboriginal children cavort about as a nuclear blast suddenly appears in the distance. Over the years, Bowie said the video was about cultural oppression and racism, but perhaps, like so many other images of Armageddon in 1980s popular culture, it reflected a nagging fear that “developed” nations were going to destroy themselves and only the innocents in other lands would be witnesses to our immolation. 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. This concept is basically what makes the world of Nineteen Eighty-Four so utterly horrible. There's three big superpowers that are all at war with each other but they have a gentleman's agreement to not seriously try to conquer or destroy each other: war is a great excuse to waste resources, keep the standard of living down and control the population through My Country, Right or Wrong. The leaders of Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia can't take their sadistic tendencies out on each others' peoples, so they take it out on their own people instead. 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.