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

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John: "Wormhole weapons do not make peace. Wormhole weapons...don't even make war. They make total destruction. Annihilation. Armageddon." 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. Missile defenses have still not met the “ Nitze criteria,” which were articulated in 1985 and specified that successful missile defenses would have to be operationally effective, cost-effective, and survivable. They have not demonstrated the ability to destroy a sufficiently high proportion of intercontinental ballistic missiles to warrant relying on them, while they also remain costlier than offensive capabilities and their survivability is an unknown. How many empty chambers would there have to be in a gun before you considered playing Russian roulette? If you survived spinning the chamber and pulling the trigger a few times, would you keep playing the game? The United States and Russia continue to rely on mutually assured destruction to deter nuclear war, despite the fact that it has come close to failing multiple times, both during the Cold War and after. The enemy now possesses a new and terrible weapon with the power to destroy many innocent lives and do incalculable damage. Should we continue to fight, not only would it result in an ultimate collapse and obliteration of the Japanese nation, but also it would lead to the total extinction of human civilization.

Mutually Assured Destruction? - ThoughtCo What Is Mutually Assured Destruction? - ThoughtCo

After the deployment of the first atomic bomb came a race between other nations to develop this same cruel weaponry. The Soviet Union did not want to find themselves in the same position as Japan in the event that they engaged in a war with the U.S. They began to work towards creating hydrogen bombs that would have an even more devastating impact than atomic bombs. The U.S. responded by equally dedicating time, effort and resources into developing their own hydrogen bomb. Not before long, other nations got in on the action. 4 a b Jervis, Robert (2021), Bartel, Fritz; Monteiro, Nuno P. (eds.), "The Nuclear Age", Before and After the Fall: World Politics and the End of the Cold War, Cambridge University Press, pp.115–131, doi: 10.1017/9781108910194.008, ISBN 978-1-108-90677-7, S2CID 244858515 As Green’s theory would expect, however, American policymakers correctly believed that they inhabited a far more competitive world. 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.In Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty, we have Farewell , which gives you the choice of what to exile: creatures, artifacts, enchantments, graveyards, or any combination of the above. There are three implications that flow from this observation. First, the bargaining advantages that the United States gained by escaping MAD might not have been very large because the costs of war remained extremely high. As my old mentor Roger Molander used to say, “The threat of one nuclear weapon detonating over Washington, D.C. during working hours is probably enough of a deterrent to focus the mind.” Second, since America likely lives in a condition of mutually assured retaliation with many of its adversaries today — Russia included — Washington probably still does not possess much of a bargaining advantage in crises, even though it possesses superior nuclear forces. Finally, crisis instability poses more of a danger in a world of mutually assured retaliation. Under MAD, striking preemptively in a crisis is futile, since neither side can limit damage to itself. Striking first in conditions of mutually assured retaliation, however, might to a certain extent pay off, depending on the vulnerabilities of an adversary’s arsenal, something an opponent will also realize. If these three observations hold, then the nuclear future might prove as, or potentially more, competitive than the nuclear past that Green describes in The Revolution that Failed.

How did we forget about mutually assured destruction? - BBC News

Massive retaliation was also criticized for failing to appreciate possible areas of Soviet superiority. That criticism grew after the Soviet Union demonstrated its technological prowess by successfully launching the first artificial Earth satellite ( Sputnik 1) in October 1957, not long after it had also made the first tests of an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), the SS-6. Concern grew that the Soviet Union was outpacing the United States in missile production and thereby leading to a “missile gap.” (It might have been argued that after a certain level of destructive capability had been reached by both sides, an effective stalemate would be reached and extra weapons would make little difference, promising only, as British Prime Minister Winston Churchill put it, to make “the rubble bounce.”) 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.Wilkie Collins and Mutually Assured Destruction". The Wilkie Collins Society. Spring 2009 . Retrieved 17 September 2014. To go after cities, if deterrence should fail, to my mind would be suicidal. It wasn’t just a question of damage-limiting; I believed—and still do—that a counterforce doctrine and posture of sufficient scope would persuade the Soviet Union that it could not count on achieving a military victory in a nuclear exchange. This would assure effective deterrence. Despite these real arms control achievements, the United States and Russia continue to rely on mutually assured destruction. Political and technological developments over the past five years have increased the risk that a nuclear exchange could occur. The relationship between the United States and Russia, the two nuclear superpowers, has deteriorated into deep disagreement over inter alia arms control issues, cyber and other forms of interference in each other’s internal affairs, Ukraine, and the principles of international conduct. DEFCON is essentially a Mutually-Assured Destruction Simulator, directly inspired by the War Games example above.