Why is mutually assured destruction important

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What Is Mutually Assured Destruction? National Security Definition and Examples. What is Total War? Definitions and Examples. What Is Communism? At least we are alive to think about it, but the weapons stockpiled during the Cold War have not been completly destroyed and could yet be used by terrorists or others. We may still have to give up some of our freedom as citizens of independent nations if we are to be free from the threat of nuclear destruction.

When that arms race ended, many people relaxed about the issue. But, since the end of the Cold War, the proliferation of nuclear-armed nation-states keeps the danger alive in a different form. The policy of MAD might no longer seem relevant to people in Europe and America, but the possibility of mass destruction and the question of what to do about it have not gone away. As we consider mutually assured destruction anew, we may be surprised to note how much the world has changed since the end of the Cold War, and it seems possible that we may even view mutually assured destruction with a kind of nostalgia.

Mutually assured destruction is possible only in a very particular political situation that is becoming increasingly impossible: all parties must be identified and monitored, means of mass destruction must be anticipated, and destruction must be a similarly unacceptable loss to all parties. In the absence of any of these conditions mutually assured destruction is not possible, and we find ourselves now in a situation wherein each of these conditions has recently been made uncertain.

This offers us an unusual opportunity to gain a new understanding of the logic of mutually assured destruction, its intuitive ethical appeal, and the ephemeral nature of its deterrent efficacy. First, mutually assured destruction is presumably only a real deterrent if the destruction that both sides are threatened with is of a sufficiently devastating scale, for a trivial loss will not motivate much reticence.

Risk of even a minimum of loss is unacceptable when nothing is thereby gained, but even a certain and heavy loss may begin to seem acceptable as the threat to the enemy becomes increasingly severe and unavoidable.

Regardless of what is acceptable to whom and in what circumstances, mutually assured destruction can only serve as an effective deterrent in those cases in which the degree of loss faced by each party involved is at least unacceptable, if not total. Even though the threat faced by the parties involved may not be entirely equivalent, if we are speaking of only cases in which an unacceptable degree of destruction is assured there is nevertheless a guarantee that no advantage can be gained at a price worth paying.

This can be reasonably called an assurance of a kind of justice, for neither combatant can bring destruction upon the other without suffering a similar fate. The assurance of immediate, assured, and severe reciprocation has a certain strong intuitive ethical appeal, for where violence cannot be prevented, it is thereby at least assured that one reaps what one sows. For a number of different reasons, mutually assured destruction is becoming increasingly difficult to guarantee.

The former is a much more secure guarantee, and is indeed the way in which the mutually assured destruction of the Cold War was established. The problem with this strategy is that as technical abilities and technological resources increase and become increasingly widespread, the parties able to wield a weapon of mass destruction become ever more numerous and, therefore, it becomes increasingly difficult to identify and monitor threats to the extent necessary to assure mutual destruction.

Additionally, as our knowledge and technical abilities increase, there are ever a greater number of methods of causing an opposed party to suffer an unacceptable loss. The identification and monitoring of hostile parties necessary to assure mutual destruction must also anticipate the means of destruction which may be brought to bear, and without this, monitoring can serve little purpose.

It was much easier to guarantee mutually assured destruction when the only weapons of mass destruction were ballistic; now we must attend to biological and chemical agents, and to any number of means of delivery. Key Terms Nuclear Deterrence : A military strategy that uses the threat of retaliation to dissuade a nation from a particular kind of attack.

History On August 6th, , an American pilot dropped the first ever deployed atomic bomb over Hiroshima, Japan, immediately killing 80, people. Controversies Mutually assured destruction is based on the principle that if a particular weapon is used in an attack, the nation being attacked will be able to retaliate with equal force and destruction.

Sources Farnam Street. Mutually Assured Destruction Quotes. Mutual assured destruction. Nash Equilibrium. Bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. What Is Mutually Assured Destruction? Cuban Missile Crisis. Scientific American. Mutually Assured Distrust. Read Next. Reference Guid. See All Icon arrow right turquoise color. Eager to learn about how behavioral science can help your organization? Get new behavioral science insights in your inbox every month. Eager to know how behavioural science can help your organization?

Contact us Icon arrow right white color. Facebook Twitter Linkedin Instagram. Icon arrow right turquoise color Back to the website. Fill out the form below to get in touch with our team. This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged. Submit Icon arrow right white color. These would permit the United States to exploit vulnerabilities in Soviet nuclear-armed bombers and submarines. And the improved accuracy of U.

Did these U. I think that the answer is more political than technical. On the technical side, Green and others have provided persuasive evidence that the United States could have limited significant damage to itself in a nuclear exchange. Given these improvements in counterforce capabilities, the United States likely could have avoided assured destruction without resorting to the absurd civilian defense schemes that were promoted by people like T.

Nonetheless, being on the receiving end of any kind of Soviet retaliatory strike seems unpleasant, to put it mildly. Cold War studies of limited nuclear attacks on the United States or the Soviet Union still paint a fairly destructive picture, with tens of millions of casualties on each side. And if anything, these studies probably downplayed the effects of mass fires.

Moreover, the jury is still out on how many nuclear weapons detonations would cause a nuclear winter. The Revolution that Failed has persuaded me — albeit in an uneasy way — that the United States might have escaped Armageddon in a nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union. However, I do not think the country would have emerged unscathed. The United States would have been better off than proponents of the theory of the nuclear revolution have claimed, but there would have still been plenty of pain to go around.

Put another way, Washington might have broken out of MAD only to find itself still in the condition of mutually assured retaliation. A better place, to be sure, but still not free of grave danger. 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.

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. 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. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara eschewed intense competition as his tenure progressed over the course of the s, such that the United States almost seemed to be taking a hiatus from the arms race and to be looking to embrace MAD instead.

At the other end of the spectrum, the Gaither Report of stoked hysteria about the nuclear balance by suggesting that the United States lacked the ability to compete in the long run with the Soviet Union. This handwringing seems misplaced, given that we now know that the United States had serious advantages in nuclear weapons capabilities going into the s.

The Cold War nuclear balance was delicate both before and after the s. For this reason, it is not especially surprising that policymakers rode an emotional rollercoaster. The Revolution that Failed should remind us that when it comes to nuclear weapons, such competitions are difficult and dangerous.

Jasen Castillo is an associate professor and the Evelyn and Ed F. Image: U.