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

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America’s most powerful nuclear bomb in service, the B83, also boasts just a 1.2 megaton yield, and even the most powerful nuclear weapon in American history, the 9 megaton B53, rings in at less than 1/5 the yield of the mighty Sarmat.

It was only with the advent of ballistic missile submarines, starting with the George Washington class in 1959, that a genuine survivable nuclear force became possible and a retaliatory second strike capability guaranteed. And yet, exactly what that meant was sinking in too. The lead scientist of America’s secretive Manhattan Project to build the bomb, Robert Oppenheimer, said that words of Hindu scripture ran through his mind as he watched the mushroom cloud over the explosion: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” However, there is some evidence that mutually assured destruction doesn’t actually work. Although no nuclear war has killed off humanity to this day, there have been a lot of close calls. The Cuban missile crisis brought us close to a nuclear holocaust. After the U.S. found out that the Soviet Union installed nuclear-armed missiles in Cuba, close to U.S. soil, the U.S. claimed it was ready to use military force to neutralize this threat if necessary. 9 If the U.S. had acted, we might not be here today. This concept is basically what makes the world of Nineteen Eighty-Four so utterly horrible. There's three big superpowers that are all at war with each other but they have a gentleman's agreement to not seriously try to conquer or destroy each other: war is a great excuse to waste resources, keep the standard of living down and control the population through My Country, Right or Wrong. The leaders of Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia can't take their sadistic tendencies out on each others' peoples, so they take it out on their own people instead. 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.

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. Campbell Craig and Sergey Radchenko, "MAD, not Marx: Khrushchev and the nuclear revolution." Journal of Strategic Studies (2018) 41#1/2:208-233. UGM-133 Trident D-5 - Missile ThreatTrident 2 | Missile Threat". Archived from the original on 2015-10-27 . Retrieved 2015-02-18.

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. Finally, can Green’s theory explain competition and arms control before and after the groovy 1970s? Danilovic, Vesna (2002). When the stakes are high :deterrence and conflict among major powers /. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. p.10. hdl: 2027/mdp.39015056796371. ISBN 978-0-472-11287-6. What caused these oscillations between pessimism and optimism about the nuclear balance? American officials did not express confidence in MAD, as predicted by the theory of the nuclear revolution. Instead, these mood swings confirm Green’s theory about a delicate nuclear competition. Ross, Douglas Alan (1998). "Canada's Functional Isolationism: And the Future of Weapons of Mass Destruction". International Journal. 54 (1): 120–142. doi: 10.2307/40203359. ISSN 0020-7020. JSTOR 40203359. America is amid an arguably overdue effort to modernize its ICBM arsenal in Northrop Grumman’s Ground Based Strategic Deterrent (GBSD) platform expected to enter service later this decade. Although the weapon’s W87 Mod 0 thermonuclear warhead’s destructive capacity has not been revealed just yet, it stands to reason that these new missiles will still offer significantly less firepower than Russia’s mighty Sarmat, let alone the terrifying 100 megaton capacity claimed by the Status-6.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. 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."

The prisoner’s dilemma is a classic philosophical thought experiment that shows why acting in one’s own self-interest often results in worse consequences than working together with others. It provides evidence that mutually assured destruction should be considered when making decisions, as it can benefit both competing parties. In the middle of the film Ice Station Zebra, this Trope is discussed (" a wonderful acronym, if there ever was one!") as part of the rapid-fire Info Dump that explains why the film's MacGuffin (a surveillance satellite that went down near the titular polar station and which contains on film the precise locations of all the nuclear silos on Russia and North America) is so important: such information would surely allow the enemy to devise a "survivable" battle strategy for an all-out nuclear assault. This is where mutually assured destruction comes in. Since multiple nations have nuclear bombs they could deploy, any one country deploying them would result in the destruction of nations and a majority of humanity. Knowing that worldwide, humanity would suffer from the deployment of a nuclear bomb forces each nation with nuclear bombs into a stalemate. The fear of retaliation inhibits action. Reverting to the childlike tendency of ‘I won’t if you won’t’, the development of mutually assured destruction as a result of nuclear bombs is actually a method of peacekeeping.1 It is a rational response to the knowledge that acting would lead to one’s own destruction. Less than a month later, the United States dropped two nuclear bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to force the country’s surrender and end World War II, killing hundreds of thousands of people. It remains the only use of nuclear weapons in war. History. (2010, January 4). Cuban Missile Crisis. https://www.history.com/topics/cold-war/cuban-missile-crisisBut if Putin turns to a weapon of mass destruction to break through strong Ukrainian resistance, such as a chemical (poison) or a tactical nuke, he will be crossing a line that could drag him into conflict with nuclear powers in the NATO alliance, particularly the US.