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

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Brendan Rittenhouse Green, The Revolution that Failed: Nuclear Competition, Arms Control, and the Cold War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020) The use of Exterminatus is a case of this. Whatever threat was on the planet is probably dead, but now the Imperium is down a planet in a time where resources are scarce enough as it is.

Nuclear strategy - Deterrence, Flexible Response, Arms Control

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. As of 2016, 174,000 survivors of the bombing are still alive, living with the physical, psychological, and social consequences. The after effects spread far beyond Japan- indeed the ripples of the first use of nuclear weapons affect us all, even if not in an obvious way.Two Tribes” entered the British charts at No. 1, was a staple on MTV, and went to No. 3 on the U.S. dance club charts. It struggled on the American pop charts, however; Americans were sometimes unwilling to sing along when nuclear anxieties were stated so bluntly. Even Sting’s “Russians” peaked at 16 on the U.S. charts, which for him was practically a flop. But the video was popular—and got the message across. Wilde, R. (2020, June 20). What Is Mutually Assured Destruction? ThoughtCo. https://www.thoughtco.com/mutually-assured-destruction-1221190

Mutually Assured Destruction: 10 Plays about Brothers and

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. The number of U.S. nuclear weapons, which peaked in 1967 at 31,255, has been reduced to 3,800 active warheads, along with 1,750 that have been retired and are awaiting dismantlement. New START permits 1,550 of those warheads to be deployed on 700 delivery vehicles. Comparable, though not identical, reductions have occurred in Russia’s nuclear forces. Paradigm changes do not come easily. As Thomas Kuhn masterfully pointed out in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, paradigm changes are usually resisted bitterly, sometimes violently. But when they occur, they usually happen with unexpected swiftness.A first strike must not be capable of preventing a retaliatory second strike or else mutual destruction is not assured. In this case, a state would have nothing to lose with a first strike, or might try to preempt the development of an opponent's second-strike capability with a first strike. To avoid this, countries may design their nuclear forces to make decapitation strike almost impossible, by dispersing launchers over wide areas and using a combination of sea-based, air-based, underground, and mobile land-based launchers.

Mutually Assured Destruction: Nuclear Weapons: Boon or Bane? Mutually Assured Destruction: Nuclear Weapons: Boon or Bane?

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]I believe that only by maintaining this superiority of strategic and nonstrategic military forces can the United States have the optimum opportunity to use its military power short of war to support its foreign policy or be in a position to win a military victory, at the lowest level of conflict adequate to do the job, if war should, nevertheless, occur.