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

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The USS George Washington (SSBN-598), the lead ship of the US Navy's first class of Fleet Ballistic Missile Submarines, Nuclear (SSBN)

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. This section does not cite any sources. Please help improve this section by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. ( August 2013) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message) All leaders with launch capability seem to care about the survival of their citizens. Winston Churchill is quoted as saying that any strategy will not "cover the case of lunatics or dictators in the mood of Hitler when he found himself in his final dugout." [62] Other countries have beefed up their military might and are in a modern-day arms race or poised to enter one, including India and Pakistan, North Korea and South Korea, and Iran and China. SourcesIn this scenario, it may seem like the rational choice is to testify because assuming your accomplice does not testify, this choice leaves you with the least amount of jail time (one year). Plus, if you do not testify, you risk unfairly going to jail for much longer than your accomplice. If each individual does testify, however, they will end up with two years’ jail time each (more than the minimum). However, in an ideal scenario, if both criminals here realize that there is mutually assured destruction, they will both do nothing, resulting in only one year of jail time each. The dilemma provides evidence for the equilibrium strategy, as the best move is no move – but it is dependent on a high degree of trust between both parties that the other side will cooperate. When MAD Doesn’t Work: Mutually Assured Distrust Time to re-assess mutually assured destruction". BMJ: British Medical Journal. 359. 2017. ISSN 0959-8138. JSTOR 26951722. Teller, Edward (1985). "Defense as a Deterrent of War". Harvard International Review. 7 (4): 11–13. ISSN 0739-1854. JSTOR 42762238. Captain John W. Dorough Jr. "Soviet Civil Defense U.S.S.R. preparations for industrial-base war survival". Air University Review, March–April 1977. Archived from the original on 2013-12-17 . Retrieved 2013-09-04.

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.” A time exposure of seven MIRVs from Peacekeeper missile passing through clouds MIRVs as counter against ABM [ edit ] People often talk about nuclear weapons in a cavalier fashion, he says, but such weapons “enable aggression”. “We should avoid normalising [them] and pretend that they somehow may have a plausible military mission.” In 2017, Russian President Vladimir Putin said the US was housing nuclear weapons too close to Russia, as both sides accused the other of violating the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. Credit: Sputnik Kremlin Could nuclear weapons come into play in Ukraine? Nuclear arsenals have evolved to include less powerful or “low-yield” nukes too (sometimes called tactical or non-strategic nuclear weapons) – and experts say this carries its own risks. If the effect of a nuclear strike can be contained to a more localised area, and the radioactive fallout reduced, will that make countries more willing to break the “nuclear taboo”, the “do not fire first” principle that stopped the Cold War spiralling into nuclear armageddon?

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). John: "Wormhole weapons do not make peace. Wormhole weapons...don't even make war. They make total destruction. Annihilation. Armageddon." Podvig agrees that, while “deterrence seems to work for Russia”, for aggressors, “it doesn’t quite work for NATO”. “This will require a serious re-evaluation and I fully expect that there will be people who would call for more nuclear weapons instead,” Podvig says. The Coming Race is about a utopian underground society powered by vril. The invention of vril-based weapons ended all war because they're so powerful that a child could wipe out millions of enemy combatants in minutes. It also ended crime, because people can defend themselves so easily. The government can no longer impose its will on the people by force, so people live in loose societies that they move between at will, and the government's purpose is to attend to practical matters rather than enforce laws. Further fueling the flame of distrust, the United States didn’t tell the Soviet Union they planned to drop an atomic bomb on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, although the United States informed them they had created such a bomb.

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. A detonation of that magnitude would not only destroy and irradiate a massive area, its positioning under water would result in a radioactive tsunami that would reach far further inland than the blast itself. In no uncertain terms, the Status-6 is intended to serve as a doomsday weapon. It’s the sort of weapon you build not to win wars, but to end them. 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. The doctrine further assumes that neither side will dare to launch a first strike because the other side would launch on warning (also called fail-deadly) or with surviving forces (a second strike), resulting in unacceptable losses for both parties. The payoff of the MAD doctrine was and still is expected to be a tense but stable global peace. However, many have argued that mutually assured destruction is unable to deter conventional war that could later escalate. Emerging domains of cyber-espionage, proxy-state conflict, and high-speed missiles threaten to circumvent MAD as a deterrent strategy. [7] Jervis, Robert (1976). Perception and Misperception in International Politics: New Edition. Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-1-4008-8511-4.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.