As that list shows, the concept is somewhat fragile and requires constant vigilance and innovation to maintain.
There is also the ever prevalent risk of accidental or terrorist detonation. Thankfully, we do not have a clear picture of the potential consequences of MAD playing out.
We do have an idea of what they would be — a nuclear apocalypse. Although the concept of a nuclear apocalypse has become almost comical due to its prevalence in science fiction, it is important to understand that it remains a very real possibility. Should a nuclear war break out, it is believed that the result would be the collapse of human civilization, as much or all of the planet becomes unsuitable for life, cities are erased and technology becomes unusable. Any people who manage to survive the initial blast s , would have a poor chance of long-term survival due to firestorms, a possible nuclear winter and the effects of radiation.
Combine that with a famine and lack of law enforcement or medical care for survivors- the outlook would be bleak, to say the least. Substantial numbers of people could survive a global world war, although it is unlikely that we would be able to overcome the secondary impact. In any case, what would human life be without any economic or political structure or any of the other important concepts we take for granted? Once again, it is difficult yet important to take this concept seriously as it seems so unrealistic.
When we take into account the fact that at least 15, nuclear weapons are held worldwide, the chances are higher than we imagine. In Bomb Steve Sheinkin writes:. The scientists concluded that the explosions would ignite massive firestorms, sending enormous amounts of dust and smoke into the atmosphere. Farming would collapse, and people all over the globe would starve to death. In the end, this is a difficult story to sum up. And, like it or not, you are in it. Would they destroy us?
You can think in terms of ability for competitors to cause you pain or for you to cause them pain. Consider two businesses engaged in tax fraud together. Either could rat the other out, knowing full well they would then be turned over. In the end, while you should try to avoid situations of mutually assured destruction, they can promote good behavior between parties. However, it only takes one party in a situation to start a massive chain reaction with usually catastrophic outcomes. Mutually assured destruction is part of the Farnam Street latticework of mental models.
Read Next. Mental Models Reading Time: 8 minutes. His question is more complex than it seems. In his declaration to the Japanese people upon the topic of surrender, Emperor Hirohito stated: The enemy now possesses a new and terrible weapon with the power to destroy many innocent lives and do incalculable damage. In a letter written at the time of the Franco-Prussian war, over 70 years before the first atomic bomb dropped, Collins wrote: I am, like the rest of my countrymen, heartily on the German side in the War.
It seems that Collins was very much ahead of his time. Alfred Nobel founder of the Nobel Prize and the inventor of dynamite recognized this too, saying: The day when two army corps can annihilate each other in one second, all civilized nations, it is to be hoped, will recoil from war and discharge their troops. The Key Components of Mutually Assured Destruction There are several key components of the doctrine of MAD: Both sides in a combat must have the capacity to completely destroy the other.
Any inequality in their power has the potential to tip the balance. The US and USSR have since developed more nuclear technology — guided missile systems, and weapons sprinkled around the globe in submarines. They assured him that should this happen, many problems would be resolved. A Yankee, whose face had been mauled in a pot-house brawl, assured General Jackson that he had received his scars in battle.
And with some expressions of mutual good-will and interest, master and man separated. Without any known cause of offence, a tacit acknowledgement of mutual dislike was shewn by Louis and de Patinos. I could have sworn I heard a cry, and one of my men spoke in a tone that assured me my imagination had not been playing a trick. Be sure to check out the full roundtable. Beating up on the theory of the nuclear revolution has become a popular enterprise these days. Decades after the end of the Cold War, scholars have begun to cast doubt on the things that I learned in graduate school about nuclear weapons, especially the notion that the condition of mutually assured destruction MAD should promote stability among the great powers.
As a former student of Charles Glaser, this, on the one hand, comes as somewhat of a shock. On the other hand, it speaks to doubts that I have long harbored about the theory of the nuclear revolution.
If the theory is so powerful, then why can it not explain the Cold War arms race? Surely there must be more going on here than simply the suboptimal behavior of dunderheaded policymakers? Not only is this volume a balm for my distress, it also makes two important contributions to our understanding of nuclear deterrence during the Cold War.
At the outset, Green provides a compelling strategic logic to explain why the United States and the Soviet Union pursued competitive nuclear weapons policies, including in the arena of arms control. Competition made good strategic sense because policymakers had doubts about the survivability of nuclear arsenals; the political and territorial status quo did not always seem clear or obvious; and strategists on both sides could never know for certain that their adversary believed in MAD.
Put another way, both the balance of interests and the balance of power are hard to measure. Complicating matters further, a country that showed that it did not believe in MAD might gain bargaining advantages in a crisis.
These advantages translated into a preference for qualitative arms races. To illustrate the causal mechanisms of his argument, Green assembles an impressive amount of archival evidence from the s. In careful detail, he takes the reader through the changes in U. If Green is right, and I think he is, his work calls into question the alleged benefits that should arise when nuclear-armed powers live under the condition of mutually assured destruction.
International politics, his book posits, is not particularly stable in these circumstances. Theorists of the nuclear revolution discount the uncertainty about the survivability of nuclear arsenals that can arise with improvements in military technology. They also discount the ambiguity surrounding the political and territorial status quo.
As a result, we should expect competition and crises, rather than the stable world predicted by the theory of the nuclear revolution. Green does a good job of explaining the wide-ranging implications of his argument for both international relations theory and national security policy.
For example, optimists about nuclear proliferation need to exercise greater caution about the spread of nuclear weapons if they engender competition rather than peace.
This is a book that the field of security studies will need to grapple with, since it overturns much of what scholars believe about nuclear deterrence. All of us who share an interest in nuclear weapons policy should read it. After finishing this masterly work, I am left with three main thoughts.
First, it seems like American policymakers got more right than wrong about the Cold War nuclear arms competition. 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.
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