MAD alone doesn't stop the race. The arsenal the US and USSR had in the 60s was already enough for MAD to work. Despite that, they spent the next 20-30 years developing even more powerful and ever more insane WMD ideas. Each step forward made the balance more fragile. Each step forward was also another roll of a dice, whether or not it'll be a leap too far, forcing the other side into preemptive first strike.
I'm pretty sure that the nuclear arms race was largely driven by adherence to MAD. And what you're describing is exactly the kind of escalate-in-kind deterrence policy that was built on top of the mutually assured destruction philosophy.
MAD was/is all a mental game to avoid a first strike. But once that happens, the calcuation is moot. In the event of a surprise attack by the USSR, the better result for the planet and humanity would have been for the US not to fire its own missiles.
Yes. MAD assumed that, even if one side launched everything and hit all it could, the other side could launch the remaining stuff and devastate the other side just as much.
First strike capability requires a time pressure that isn't as intense in MAD. For example, Russia's Dead Hand system was designed with the philosophy such that, even if America struck first, there's still enough leftover to post-mortem launch the counter-destruction. That no longer applies, so now there's tons of immediate time pressure to determine if an early-warning alert is a true or false positive.
The Cuban missile crisis is an example of MAD working as intended. If it weren't for the threat of nuclear war the Cuban missile crisis would have turned into the "Russian tanks in Paris and Marines in Havana crisis"
We avoided having them see the light of day because MAD is the single most effective peacekeeping tool ever developed. The fact that both sides had doomsday devices all but guaranteed that they would never be used. People can be evil, but they're selfishly evil.
The premise of MAD is the enemy will fire back as with conventional warfare. But if US nukes Moscow, Moscow retaliating by by nuking DC will only assure destruction of St. Petersburg and other cities and locations, not retaliating in fear of further escalation is a very real scenario. But military minds prepare for the worst. The damage caused by the first strike as well as the success of the retaliation attempts can heavily influence victory and escalation.
I call it Pharoh's dillema. When Moses caused all the horrible things to happen, the pharoh gave in but changed his mind eventually. But when his precious first born died, he gave in for good. Kind of how nagasaki needed to happen instead of just hiroshima. Realistic capability means little when facing grand and unthinkable loss.
MAD prevented war but trying to circumvent it did not. Which is ultimately why space weapons were banned.
The nuclear arms race is a game nobody should ever be allowed to win. That's a key point of the whole doctrine.
MAD as a concept faded out in the early 1980s. Improved accuracy led to the policy of counterforce ( against enemy military assets ) instead of countervalue ( cities and social structure ).
MAD was a necessary compromise when delivery accuracy and certainty were insufficient to target individual threat sites. It led to enormous megatonne weapons. Whereas modern counterforce involves small-yield warheads placed accurately.
I'm not convinced MAD actually works. Once you see the bombs flying, the only logical thing to do is to give up your pre-war resolve of retaliation and completely submit - start printing Soviet flags so to speak. Of course, pre-war you'll try to convince the enemy that it isn't so, but they are not stupid.
The only thing that saved us IMO was the power of the political elites (in East and West), that despite all saber-rattling rhetorics, never wanted a war. Now that that power is waning, I'm not sure what will save us this time around. Maybe religious elites can instill a taboo against using this kind of technology for harm?
I think you'd have to follow through in case it didn't turn out that the world was destroyed in the first strike[1] and other nuclear capable actors remained.
[1] there's so much non-information about what would actually happen that the uncertainty is the strongest signal in the channel.
The point of MAD is the "logic" ( that actually inspired Heller to write "Catch-22" ) which is:
Nuclear weapons are no good if you use them. They're only any good if you don't use them.
Played properly, not only is there no nuclear war, there is no conventional large scale war. This happened. We still ran one of the warm spots in the Cold War at the German/Russian border. And nothing actually ever happened.
We could only have stupid and in cases, possibly ruinous proxy wars in Vietnam and Afghanistan (1980 version). That's (globally) better than WWII, conventional or nuclear. Those were not psychologically sustainable. So they ended.
I attribute this to MAD. Any technology which allows us to use one simple koan of bullsh8t to keep from killing each other is a very useful technology.
It was between maintaining the capability of such a nuclear war to deter aggression, and not maintaining it and surely having been invaded by the Soviets.
For the madness that MAD was, for all intents and purposes, it actually worked.
Yeah with MADD it seems like only a matter of time when somethings fail (human(s) tech, combination) and a catastrophic mistake is made.
Too many situations started, and were saved simply by happenstance or imperfect information.
IIRC during the Cuban missile crisis local Russian commanders had the authorization to launch if they felt the US was invading. Because of course, you couldn't have a deterrent if you weren't able to launch during a communication blackout. Of course that also meant that any given accident or misunderstanding could lead to a launch and full scale response. Control of starting the war was now in the hands of folks with even less information...
MADD seems to guarantee a war as much as deter it.
I still don't understand how a major nuclear accident didn't happen (at minimum), or really, a full nuclear exchange, given the game theoretic and technical challenges of having multiple nuclear arsenals on hair trigger alert for decades.
Given that many US weapons weren't even one-point safe until the 80s, and I doubt Soviet weapons were better, and there were a fair number of routine accidents with those weapons, there must have been some undisclosed policy of secretly keeping the weapons even less ready than has ever been reported, or we've been unbelievably lucky. (If I could have been completely certain it would remain secret, deploying primarily inert weapons (just replace the HEU with lower enriched uranium, or for plutonium weapons, even just screwing up the lensing) would have been very tempting. If you believe in MAD, then really only deterrence has any value; the retaliatory value in reality could be forgone.)
It would also account for why weapons were never used intentionally post WW2 -- if you knew your arsenal actually was disabled, you'd bluster even more but never use it.
The problem with MAD is it requires perfect decision making or perfect luck with no graceful failure if things go wrong.
From the Cuban Missile Crisis portion of Fog of War
"Lesson #2: Rationality will not save us.
I want to say, and this is very important: at the end we lucked out. It was luck that prevented nuclear war. We came that close to nuclear war at the end. Rational individuals: Kennedy was rational; Khrushchev was rational; Castro was rational. Rational individuals came that close to total destruction of their societies. And that danger exists today."
MAD works because the two parties do their best to convince the other party that they'd launch the missiles as soon as any of their allies or controlled territories are touched. If there is a crack in their resolve the other party can take a bite, then another one and then the alliance crumbles. Or they launch their missiles hoping for no retaliation.
The MAD doctrine seems to have worked with binary superpowers up through the 80's.
But, I think its an open (and rather scary) question as to whether MAD will continue to work with multiple parties some of whom are batshit crazy and have demonstrated utter disregard for the safety and well-being of their populace.
Is their leadership insane enough to sit in a well-stocked bunker while setting off an H-Bomb in South Korea or elsewhere.... umm yeah, I think so.
MAD only lasts until it doesn't. I don't think someone like Trump would have handled the Cuban Missile Crisis well.
There's also the risk that these systems fail. Even if they blocked half the ICBMs, it costs too much to let the others in. But it also costs too much to not invest in such a system.
I'd suggest you look over the distance from the USSR to the USA to see how such an attack would have played out. There was no such possibility u til ICBMs at which time MAD was a thing.
It makes no sense to preemptively strike them. It's a monstrous instinct.
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