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

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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. a b Richard Pipes (1977). "Why the Soviet Union Thinks It Could Fight and Win a Nuclear War" (PDF). Reed College. Archived from the original (PDF) on December 14, 2013 . Retrieved September 4, 2013.

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. The empty control room of the shuttered Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine, now under control by Russian forces after a fierce battle in the radioactive exclusion zone. Credit: AP How would NATO and the West respond? A major Princeton University simulation war-gaming a nuclear escalation between Russia and the US predicted 90 million people could be killed in tit-for-tat strikes within the first few hours of such a conflict. Past simulations have offered similarly sobering results – even when just a warning shot is fired, it often ends in nuclear strikes on cities. Alexander Vershbow, a former deputy secretary-general of NATO, told The New York Times that Western leaders had concluded Russia was sincere in its plans to use nuclear weapons in a major crisis, meaning any misstep that the Kremlin mistakes for war could escalate fast. 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. Britain managed to work out its arms race with France and Russia with two separate treaties. But Germany had also drastically increased its military budget and might, building a large navy to contest Britain’s naval dominance in hopes of becoming a world power.

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Tesla, Nikola, The New Art of Projecting Concentrated Non-dispersive Energy through the Natural Media, System of Particle Acceleration for Use in National Defense, circa 16 May 1935. Now, the one thing they might use nukes for is to destroy a significant concentration of the Ukrainian army,” Ryan says. “Because that’s hard to kill. So that would probably be the most likely target, not a city.”

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.Former US intelligence official Christopher Chivvis writes that scores of war games carried out by the US and its allies have predicted Putin will launch a single nuclear strike if threatened. A demonstration explosion could “make the lights go out in Oslo” and trigger a response in kind from NATO. Even if both sides stop at demonstration detonations, the nuclear taboo will have been broken, “and we are in an entirely new era”, Chivvis writes. 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. After negotiating with him, the Soviets dubbed him the “Silver Fox,” and his biographer, Strobe Talbott, referred to Nitze as the “grey eminence of nuclear diplomacy.” 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. 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. MAD has been invoked by more than one weapons inventor. For example, Richard Jordan Gatling patented his namesake Gatling gun in 1862 with the partial intention of illustrating the futility of war. [12] Likewise, after his 1867 invention of dynamite, Alfred Nobel stated that "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." [13] In 1937, Nikola Tesla published The Art of Projecting Concentrated Non-dispersive Energy through the Natural Media, [14] a treatise concerning charged particle beam weapons. [15] Tesla described his device as a "superweapon that would put an end to all war."