What was mad in the cold war

International politics, his book posits, is not particularly stable in these circumstances. Theorists of the nuclear revolution discount the uncertainty about the survivability of nuclear arsenals that can arise with improvements in military technology. They also discount the ambiguity surrounding the political and territorial status quo.

As a result, we should expect competition and crises, rather than the stable world predicted by the theory of the nuclear revolution. Green does a good job of explaining the wide-ranging implications of his argument for both international relations theory and national security policy.

For example, optimists about nuclear proliferation need to exercise greater caution about the spread of nuclear weapons if they engender competition rather than peace. This is a book that the field of security studies will need to grapple with, since it overturns much of what scholars believe about nuclear deterrence.

All of us who share an interest in nuclear weapons policy should read it. 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. This observation contradicts the consensus in the scholarly literature , which holds that the nuclear revolution made the arms race unnecessary and not really all that dangerous.

According to this view, which is still widely held today, the condition of MAD should have stabilized international politics , since the requirements of nuclear deterrence were easily met and nearly impossible to overturn. Because nuclear arsenals remained secure, the cost of war was too high to risk competition.

The intense nuclear competition, therefore, was not caused by strategic circumstances, but rather by domestic pathologies, which prevented policymakers in both Washington and Moscow from learning to live with and love the bomb. Policymakers simply missed the boat when it came to how and why nuclear deterrence worked.

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. To illustrate, I recall watching former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld debate proponents of the nuclear revolution about the nature of deterrence at a meeting of the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations.

Rumsfeld argued that nuclear deterrence was difficult and not guaranteed, not even in MAD, if such a thing existed. Perhaps the views of the defense policy luminary Paul Nitze serve as a good snapshot of the Cold War consensus among policymakers about nuclear weapons. Nitze stands out as a unique player in the defense politics of the time, due to his four decades of experience in government under both Republican and Democratic administrations.

Throughout his career, Nitze dismissed the deterrent value of MAD. The threat of mutually assured destruction, he felt, lacked the credibility to deter a Soviet attack on NATO or the United States, a concern that was widely shared within the U.

As he explained :. To go after cities, if deterrence should fail, to my mind would be suicidal. This would assure effective deterrence. Of course, this objective was not sensible, but MAD proponents argued that was the point: The outcome would be so dreadful that both sides would be deterred from starting a nuclear war or even taking actions that might lead to it.

Asian values — fashionable when South Korea and Thailand were economic success stories and the West was mired in recession — lost their luster following the Asian financial crisis.

Throughout much of the Cold War, U. Critics like military strategists Herman Kahn and Colin Gray disagreed. They argued that nuclear warheads were immensely destructive but not qualitatively different from previous weapons of warfare. Consequently, the traditional rules of strategy applied: Security policy could only rest on credible threats i. The adoption of a policy that involved throwing up your hands and destroying the world if war actually broke out was not only the height of irresponsibility; MAD also failed to address the main strategic concern for the United States, which was to prevent the Soviets from invading Western Europe.

The stability that MAD was supposed to provide actually would have allowed U. If the United States could not have threatened to escalate a conflict by using nuclear weapons, then the Soviets would have had free rein to fight and win a conventional war in Europe. Privately, most generals and top civilian leaders were never convinced of the utility of MAD, and that skepticism was reflected in both Soviet and U.

Each side strove for advantage, sought to minimize damage to its society, deployed defenses when deemed practical, and sought limited nuclear options that were militarily effective. Yet, for all these efforts, it is highly probable that a conventional war in Europe or, even more likely, the limited use of nuclear weapons would have prompted a full-scale nuclear war that would have resulted in mutual destruction.

In response, U. Most dramatically, President Ronald Reagan called for missile defense, declaring in that "to look down to an endless future with both of us sitting here with these horrible missiles aimed at each other and the only thing preventing a holocaust is just so long as no one pulls this trigger — this is unthinkable. When the United States emerged as the dominant military power, defense became a much more attractive option than deterrence.

Why threaten to punish another country for an attack when you can beat it back? According to MAD, trying to protect yourself is destabilizing because it threatens the other side. In a world where the United States faces no peer competitor that could threaten it with complete annihilation, thinking in these terms makes no sense. Indeed, even the simplest missiles are difficult to intercept.

Ironically, primitive warheads that tumble in flight — the very types of missiles that might be launched by low-tech U.

By , it became clear that a disarming first strike was increasingly infeasible, and by a "city avoidance" doctrine was replaced by a MAD strategy. The appearance of Soviet nuclear weapons suddenly transformed the situation, and strategists found themselves confronted with little choice but to make more bombs or follow the pipe dream of removing all nuclear bombs.

The only possible option was chosen, and both sides in the Cold War built more destructive bombs and more evolved ways of delivering them, including being able to initiate counter bombing runs almost immediately and placing submarines around the globe.

Proponents argued that the fear of MAD was the best way to secure peace. One alternative was attempting a limited nuclear exchange from which one side might hope to survive with an advantage.

Both sides of the debate, including the pros and the anti-MAD, worried it might actually tempt some leaders to act. MAD was preferred because if successful, it did stop the massive death toll. Mutually Assured Destruction is based on fear and cynicism and is one of the most brutally and horribly pragmatic ideas ever put into practice. At one point, the world really did stand opposed to each other with the power to wipe both sides out in a day. Amazingly, this probably did stop a greater war from taking place.

For long periods of the Cold War, MAD entailed a relative lack of missile defenses so as to guarantee mutual destruction. Anti-ballistic missile systems were closely examined by the other side to see if they changed the situation. Things changed when Ronald Reagan became president of the U. He decided the U. However, the U. This is cited as one reason why Gorbachev decided to end the Cold War. Both superpowers recognized that the first requirement of an effective deterrent was that it should survive or "ride out" a surprise "counterforce" targeted attack without being decimate — a task made difficult by the ever increasing numbers of accurate delivery systems, "penetration aids," and multiple warheads.

This led to the foundation of the nuclear triad, or use of three different types of delivery systems bombers, missiles, and submarines to assure that a second-strike capability existed able to cause massive destruction to the attacking nation.

Ballistic missile defenses were outlawed; "first strike" weapons were decommissioned; civil defense was discouraged.