Most of them are held by the United States and Russia, which have about 4,000 warheads each. Marxism evolved from the primordial swamp of the Industrial Revolution but lies gasping for relevance after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Myanmars former soldiers admit to atrocities. 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. Early in the Carter administration, U.S. officials concluded that the new Soviet SS-20 missile did not pose a threat, since NATO possessed other theater nuclear forces to counter it. A string of films and TV series in the 1980s - from WarGames, Threads, and When the Wind Blows - reflected these fears. Heres what the science says, Type 3 diabetes: Symptoms, causes and treatments. Experts in nuclear weapons arsenals estimate that the United States had more than 30,000 nuclear warheads in service at the height of the Cold War in the 1960s and 1970s, while the Soviet Union may have stockpiled more than 40,000 warheads by the late 1980s, according to BBC News (opens in new tab). He has also written for the BBC, NBC News, National Geographic, Scientific American, Air & Space, and many others. Apart from the fear that one side would do something stupid, there was also the fear of technology and the question of 'what if an accident happened'.". 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. But it also led to periods of the Cold War when both the U.S. and the Soviet Union spent huge amounts of money to develop nuclear weapons and the methods to use them.
International politics, his book posits, is not particularly stable in these circumstances. A defensive strategy that could achieve even 99 percent efficiency is hard to imagine short of incredible worldwide cooperation, expense, and sacrifice of civil liberties. It is still in operation today between the nuclear forces of the U.S. and Russia, and experts have suggested that MAD is the reason that small states such as Israel are thought to have developed nuclear missiles. Support Our Site, Cold War: An Illustrated History, 1945-1991. Mutual assured destruction refers to the concept that two superpowers are capable of annihilating each other with nuclear weapons, regardless of whether they are attacked first. "But another factor might be simple changes in risk fashion - it becoming more popular recently to worry about global warming, for example.". After negotiating with him, the Soviets dubbed him the Silver Fox, and his biographer, Strobe Talbott, referred to Nitze as the grey eminence of nuclear diplomacy.. By signing up, I agree to the Privacy Policy and Terms of Use and to occasionally receive special offers from Foreign Policy. Even if that isn't necessarily the policy or intent, the systems and practices remain in place.". If deterrence failed in Europe and the Soviet Union launched a blitzkrieg against NATO, the United States needed more options than doing nothing or throwing the nuclear kitchen sink at Moscow in response. 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. The other side of this coin is that an adversary who believes the United States is certain to attack will have nothing to lose by resorting to WMD. When the United States emerged as the dominant military power, defense became a much more attractive option than deterrence. Although no one has tested the concept of mutual assured destruction by nuclear weapons, it seems to have prevented war between superpowers since nuclear weapons were invented in the 1940s. Cave explorers discover a 19th-century mining scene preserved like a time capsule, Does cardio kill gains? I Can Never Go Back. 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.S. government and by its European allies. MAD does not seem appropriate for rivals in the Third World either. Brendan Rittenhouse Green has provided a very compelling answer to these questions in his creative new book, The Revolution that Failed: Nuclear Competition, Arms Control, and the Cold War. 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. The rise in market volatility, in our opinion, is a function of digitalisation, which is exaggerating human mood swings by the unprecedented dissemination of information via the internet.". Top 10 doomsday threats. However, other factors than the ones identified in The Revolution that Failed might have contributed to these shifting estimates. They should select competitive strategies that reflect their strengths and weaknesses, or, as he puts it, constitutional fitness. To that end, American policymakers could count on advantages in production and direction. Would it have looked the same if Washington had tried to extend deterrence with conventional forces, instead of relying primarily on nuclear weapons? India and Pakistan remains a potential flashpoint. 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. But about the same time officials said the U.S. needed to reduce its nuclear arsenal to 5,000 warheads, and in the mid-1990s officials talked of reducing the number again to 2,500, so clearly many more had already been built. But the end of the Cold War hasn't removed the nuclear warheads. A wide swath of analysts and government officials largely shared his pessimism about MAD. In the end both superpowers gave ground and the problem was averted but mankind had never come so close to doomsday. Confronted with these dilemmas, the Bush administration has turned to what it calls preemption, but what is actually prevention. And adversaries could deliver nuclear weapons in a variety of other ways, such as by airplanes, ships, and cargo containers. Dependency theory thrived amidst a backlash against economic imperialism yet withered in a globalized era of free trade and foreign investment. Ukrainians given sight back settle into new life, 'We've spent years preparing our Comic-Con costumes' Video'We've spent years preparing our Comic-Con costumes', The woman who built a career from true crime and make-up, Whisky makers are turning their backs on peat, No faith in Russia, Germany scrambles for energy, Most of us don't clean our teeth in the right way, Why dark Japanese fairy tale Princess Mononoke was too much for Hollywood, Some street vendors say moonlight and dew are the magic ingredients. An adversary who cannot be deterred and whose attacks cannot be defended against must be stopped before it gains the capability to do great harm. They argued that nuclear warheads were immensely destructive but not qualitatively different from previous weapons of warfare. Relations between Russia and the West have deteriorated in recent years. Critics like military strategists Herman Kahn and Colin Gray disagreed. But U.S. allies, West Germany in particular, convinced America that the SS-20 demanded an urgent American counter. Both countries possessed seemingly secure second-strike forces of such size that, no matter how well they executed a first strike, neither would escape a devastating retaliatory blow. But the threat of nuclear annihilation remains real. The threat of the military-industrial complex is taken seriously only in Hollywood films and on conspiracy newsgroups. Competition made good strategic sense because policymakers had doubts about the survivability of nuclear arsenals; the political and territorial status quo did not always seem clear or obvious; and strategists on both sides could never know for certain that their adversary believed in MAD. "At least several hundred American and Russian nuclear missiles remain on 'hard alert' capable of being launched within minutes.
Mutual assured destruction kept the two Cold War superpowers in check but offers little assurance to nations threatened by suicide terrorists. American officials did not express confidence in MAD, as predicted by the theory of the nuclear revolution. "The fear of nuclear war has diminished partly because the risk has receded significantly with the end of the Cold War," says Nick Bostrom, director of Oxford University's Future of Humanity Institute. For instance, "rogue states," like North Korea and Iran, are striving to develop nuclear missiles, perhaps in the hope that they will be able to at least inflict severe damage on an enemy before they are annihilated by a nuclear counterstrike a partial application of the MAD doctrine, according to a 2019 analysis by the U.S. Department of Defense (opens in new tab). FOREIGN POLICY has invited six notable minds to sort through the dustbin of history and share what they found. And the improved accuracy of U.S. forces would offset Soviet advantages in land-based ICBMs. But the fear of a war in which the aim is to wipe out the entire population of an enemy has startlingly diminished. Is Europe set for its worst wildfire season? Similarly, from the Office of Net Assessment the highly influential Defense Department strategist Andrew Marshall commissioned and conducted studies to investigate how the United States could most effectively compete with the Soviet Union. NY 10036. In the same year, Nato's military planning operation Able Archer led some Russian commanders to conclude that a Nato nuclear launch was imminent. For example, the Reagan administration seemed far more ruthless in its pursuit of American qualitative superiority when it began negotiations with the Soviets on the Strategic Arms Reductions Talks (START) than the Nixon and Ford administrations did during the SALT process. *The US line only includes warheads in the Department of Defense stockpile, which was declassified in May 2010. In their view, too much uncertainty surrounded the requirements of nuclear deterrence, including the survivability of nuclear forces. Eight months after McNamara's speech the notion of MAD was almost put to the test by the Cuban Missile Crisis. By 2004, a report (opens in new tab) for the Strategic Studies Institute of the U.S. Army War College had declared,"nuclear Mutual Assured Destruction thinking appears to be in decline," with the U.S. planning to develop more accurate nuclear weapons that would reduce the number of civilians killed in a nuclear strike. It wasnt just a question of damage-limiting; I believedand still dothat 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. Why did leaders in the United States, NATO, and the Soviet Union not take comfort in MAD?
After finishing this masterly work, I am left with three main thoughts. He warned. The perception of U.S. NATO allies of the credibility of the American deterrent, for example, seems to have also played an important role in shaping American policy. 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. Because nuclear arsenals remained secure, the cost of war was too high to risk competition. Theorists of the nuclear revolution discount the uncertainty about the survivability of nuclear arsenals that can arise with improvements in military technology. Even those who disagreed had little reason to resurrect MAD in the aftermath of the Cold War.
However, a nuclear war could begin if the Indian government launched a large military incursion aimed at destroying terrorist camps or punishing Pakistan for supporting these groups. Policymakers Largely Got It Right: Deterrence During the Cold War Was Not Easy. Dependency theory thrived amidst a backlash against economic imperialism yet withered in a globalized era of free trade and foreign investment. According to MAD, trying to protect yourself is destabilizing because it threatens the other side. If Green is right, and I think he is, his work calls into question the alleged benefits that should arise when nuclear-armed powers live under the condition of mutually assured destruction. But that MAD number rapidly increased, and by the time of the Carter administration in 1977, military planners argued that the U.S. needed 2,000 nuclear warheads. This handwringing seems misplaced, given that we now know that the United States had serious advantages in nuclear weapons capabilities going into the 1960s. Some have speculated Saudi Arabia could follow if Iran succeeds and it's been suggested that Israel already has more than 100 warheads. We begin bombing in five minutes.". Taken together with advances in communication, surveillance, and precision, America fielded an impressive array of counterforce capabilities. The authorities tried to offer reassurance. As a former student of Charles Glaser, this, on the one hand, comes as somewhat of a shock. As he explained: To go after cities, if deterrence should fail, to my mind would be suicidal. Decades after the end of the Cold War, scholars have begun to cast doubt on the things that I learned in graduate school about nuclear weapons, especially the notion that the condition of mutually assured destruction (MAD) should promote stability among the great powers. Editors Note: This is an excerpt from Book Review Roundtable: The Revolution that Failed from our sister publication, the Texas National Security Review. According to Darwinism, species that adapt to their environment thrive; those that fail to evolve face extinction. Children speculated in the playground about the first signs of a nuclear attack - hair and fingernails falling out - and whether one could survive a nuclear winter. The costs of war would be very high if they were wrong. Economics. Surely there must be more going on here than simply the suboptimal behavior of dunderheaded policymakers? If the theory is so powerful, then why can it not explain the Cold War arms race? The Revolution that Failed should remind us that when it comes to nuclear weapons, such competitions are difficult and dangerous. Thus the true philosophy of nuclear deterrence was established. Trump chose not to act during Capitol riot, committee says, Ukraine and Russia 'poised to sign grain deal', Russia about to run out of steam in Ukraine - MI6. Sometimes the black humour emanated from unlikely places. For instance, a 2012 study by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists found that just 100 nuclear detonations of the size that struck Hiroshima and Nagasaki would usher in a planetary nuclear winter, which would drop temperatures lower than they were in the Little Ice Age, Live Science previously reported.). NEW FOR SUBSCRIBERS: These would permit the United States to exploit vulnerabilities in Soviet nuclear-armed bombers and submarines. Source: Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. The Club of Romes doomsday prophecies of global starvation are now starved for credibility. Cold War nuclear weapons policy: a cycle of optimism and pessimism about the state of the nuclear competition. In theory, the U.S. government could concoct a minimalist form of MAD by threatening retaliation in the form of killing terrorists families or destroying Muslim holy sites. President Kennedy's Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, set out in a speech to the American Bar Foundation a theory of flexible nuclear response. The term "assured destruction" was first used in the 1960s by then-U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, who served in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. Read about our approach to external linking. At other times, the sky was falling. Indeed, even the simplest missiles are difficult to intercept. But predicting the future accurately is quite difficult. Mutual assured destruction kept the two Cold War superpowers in check but offers little assurance to nations threatened by suicide terrorists. My informed hunch tells me that there is much that Greens argument can explain about the periods of history that preceded and followed that decade. What human-made structures can be seen from space? Expand your perspective with unlimited access to FP. In the event of a Soviet attack the US would have enough nuclear firepower to survive a first wave of nuclear strikes and strike back. Stephanie Serrano). A U.S. Titan nuclear missile.
(Image credit: Michael Dunning via Getty Images), End of the world? Ironically, primitive warheads that tumble in flight the very types of missiles that might be launched by low-tech U.S. adversaries such as Iraq or North Korea are harder to track than are more sophisticated ones. Live Science is supported by its audience. For example, optimists about nuclear proliferation need to exercise greater caution about the spread of nuclear weapons if they engender competition rather than peace. On the set of Stanley Kubrick's Dr Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, Protesters in Khrushchev and Kennedy masks in 1962, 'We've spent years preparing our Comic-Con costumes' Video, 'We've spent years preparing our Comic-Con costumes', New telescope catches dead suns smashing together, Russia 'looting' steel bound for Europe and UK, US reports first polio case in nearly a decade, Ex-policeman jailed for George Floyd killing role, Chappelle show cancelled over joke controversy, Sri Lankan forces raid anti-government camp. Moving before the threat fully materializes is rational only if the government is quite certain that failing to do so will lead to a disastrous attack by an adversary. Jasen Castillo is an associate professor and the Evelyn and Ed F. Kruse 49 Faculty Fellow in the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University, as well as the co-director of the Albritton Center for Grand Strategy. Brendan Rittenhouse Green, The Revolution that Failed: Nuclear Competition, Arms Control, and the Cold War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020). The Taliban Detained Me for Doing My Job. U.S. officials displayed great sensitivity to the concerns of Washingtons allies.
According to a 2007 study in the journal Asian Affairs: An American Review (opens in new tab), China, the third nuclear superpower, does not have the capacity to threaten true mutually assured destruction because its relatively small arsenal of nuclear missiles does not have a credible "second strike" capability, which would be needed to automatically respond to a nuclear attack.
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. There are concerns about Iran and North Korea's nuclear programmes and fears that terrorists might get hold of a nuclear bomb. They could also not know with enough certainty if the Soviets agreed about the virtues of MAD. Not only is this volume a balm for my distress, it also makes two important contributions to our understanding of nuclear deterrence during the Cold War. In 1983 there were a number of Russian false alarms. Several thousand additional retired but intact warheads are awaiting dismantling, probably 3,500-4,500 as of August 2010. Nonetheless, being on the receiving end of any kind of Soviet retaliatory strike seems unpleasant, to put it mildly. These are modern fears that John F Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev, leading the superpowers at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, would struggle to comprehend.
In certain scenarios, deterrence still works to some degree. The fear of impending attack became a part of everyday conversation. But these options are politically unpalatable. Mutual assured destruction is the concept of nuclear superpowers being able to completely destroy each other. Throughout his career, Nitze dismissed the deterrent value of MAD. These advantages translated into a preference for qualitative arms races. Instead, the Bush administration sees (or perhaps is looking for) significant preemptive military uses for nuclear weapons, such as destroying an adversarys wmd sites (silos or weapons facilities) that are buried deep underground. Applying the Theory Before and After the 1970s. The Soviet Union's early warning system mistakenly picked up a US missile coming into USSR airspace. Live Science is part of Future US Inc, an international media group and leading digital publisher. This would assure effective deterrence. Striking first in conditions of mutually assured retaliation, however, might to a certain extent pay off, depending on the vulnerabilities of an adversarys arsenal, something an opponent will also realize. The Revolution that Failed is quite good at illustrating the U.S. technological improvements that were made during the 1970s, which gave Washington the ability to significantly limit damage to itself in a nuclear exchange. But complete annihilation of an enemy is not the only way MAD comes into play. For instance, it would be suicidal for Pakistan to attack India with nuclear weapons. Asian values -- fashionable when South Korea and Thailand were economic success stories and the West was mired in recession -- lost their luster following the 1997 Asian financial crisis. A top Russia advisor to three U.S. presidents explains why the world shouldnt fall for Moscows narrative that it can wait out the West in Ukraine. The Dustbin of History: Mutual Assured Destruction. 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. Click + to receive email alerts when new stories are published on, Ukraine Has Ground Down Russias Arms Business, Chinas Strategy Needs Study, Not Assumptions. And when the Carter administration pushed its countervailing strategy in the late 1970s, the Joint Chiefs of Staff complained, in Janne Nolans words, that the United States still did not have the forces to execute these even more elaborate civilian fantasies.. The most serious stand-off today is not the US and Russia but the prospect of a nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan in which "tens of millions would die", Rogers suggests. By Since the end of the Cold War, the superpowers have taken steps to limit their nuclear arsenals. Under MAD, striking preemptively in a crisis is futile, since neither side can limit damage to itself. One fact that clearly emerges from Greens book is that policymakers seemed to correctly understand the dynamics of Cold War nuclear deterrence. It is a clue to the eventual demise of mutual assured destruction (MAD) that the term was coined by a critic who sought to highlight how ludicrous the concept was. Even if Pakistan were able to destroy Indias nuclear stockpile, Indias armed forces could still dismember Pakistan. The concept of mutual assured destruction even made it to the movies. Perhaps that is the beauty of Greens argument. In theory, under mutual assured destruction, a nuclear attack by one superpower will be met with an overwhelming nuclear counterattack by their target using early warning systems, automated missiles, airborne nuclear bombs, and missile-armed hidden submarines. Proponents of Reagans anti-MAD policies credited them with helping to bring down the Soviet empire. My hunch is that nuclear competition would have still taken place contrary to the dictates of the theory of the nuclear revolution but that the arms race would have developed with significantly less intensity. Economics 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. Moreover, the jury is still out on how many nuclear weapons detonations would cause a nuclear winter. The Cold War nuclear balance was delicate both before and after the 1970s. McNamara estimated that a nuclear strike force with the equivalent explosive power of 400 megatons of TNT a "few hundred" missiles, as some military planners said was needed to ensure an effective nuclear deterrence, according to the Brookings Institution (opens in new tab). Future US, Inc. Full 7th Floor, 130 West 42nd Street, The ghost of MAD remains even if people would rather not think about it. The Pakistanis might decide, in turn, to use nuclear weapons on their own soil against invading forces. Beating up on the theory of the nuclear revolution has become a popular enterprise these days. It was later satirised by When the Wind Blows, which portrayed an elderly couple building their shelter and perishing in the nuclear aftermath. This strategy makes more sense in theory than in practice, however. For many analysts the world is now a less stable place than it was during the Cold War. Heres why you can trust us. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. I think that the answer is more political than technical. A similar vacillation occurred with respect to the balance of intermediate-range nuclear forces in Europe. For this reason, it is not especially surprising that policymakers rode an emotional rollercoaster. And if anything, these studies probably downplayed the effects of mass fires.
International politics, his book posits, is not particularly stable in these circumstances. A defensive strategy that could achieve even 99 percent efficiency is hard to imagine short of incredible worldwide cooperation, expense, and sacrifice of civil liberties. It is still in operation today between the nuclear forces of the U.S. and Russia, and experts have suggested that MAD is the reason that small states such as Israel are thought to have developed nuclear missiles. Support Our Site, Cold War: An Illustrated History, 1945-1991. Mutual assured destruction refers to the concept that two superpowers are capable of annihilating each other with nuclear weapons, regardless of whether they are attacked first. "But another factor might be simple changes in risk fashion - it becoming more popular recently to worry about global warming, for example.". After negotiating with him, the Soviets dubbed him the Silver Fox, and his biographer, Strobe Talbott, referred to Nitze as the grey eminence of nuclear diplomacy.. By signing up, I agree to the Privacy Policy and Terms of Use and to occasionally receive special offers from Foreign Policy. Even if that isn't necessarily the policy or intent, the systems and practices remain in place.". If deterrence failed in Europe and the Soviet Union launched a blitzkrieg against NATO, the United States needed more options than doing nothing or throwing the nuclear kitchen sink at Moscow in response. 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. The other side of this coin is that an adversary who believes the United States is certain to attack will have nothing to lose by resorting to WMD. When the United States emerged as the dominant military power, defense became a much more attractive option than deterrence. Although no one has tested the concept of mutual assured destruction by nuclear weapons, it seems to have prevented war between superpowers since nuclear weapons were invented in the 1940s. Cave explorers discover a 19th-century mining scene preserved like a time capsule, Does cardio kill gains? I Can Never Go Back. 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.S. government and by its European allies. MAD does not seem appropriate for rivals in the Third World either. Brendan Rittenhouse Green has provided a very compelling answer to these questions in his creative new book, The Revolution that Failed: Nuclear Competition, Arms Control, and the Cold War. 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. The rise in market volatility, in our opinion, is a function of digitalisation, which is exaggerating human mood swings by the unprecedented dissemination of information via the internet.". Top 10 doomsday threats. However, other factors than the ones identified in The Revolution that Failed might have contributed to these shifting estimates. They should select competitive strategies that reflect their strengths and weaknesses, or, as he puts it, constitutional fitness. To that end, American policymakers could count on advantages in production and direction. Would it have looked the same if Washington had tried to extend deterrence with conventional forces, instead of relying primarily on nuclear weapons? India and Pakistan remains a potential flashpoint. 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. But about the same time officials said the U.S. needed to reduce its nuclear arsenal to 5,000 warheads, and in the mid-1990s officials talked of reducing the number again to 2,500, so clearly many more had already been built. But the end of the Cold War hasn't removed the nuclear warheads. A wide swath of analysts and government officials largely shared his pessimism about MAD. In the end both superpowers gave ground and the problem was averted but mankind had never come so close to doomsday. Confronted with these dilemmas, the Bush administration has turned to what it calls preemption, but what is actually prevention. And adversaries could deliver nuclear weapons in a variety of other ways, such as by airplanes, ships, and cargo containers. Dependency theory thrived amidst a backlash against economic imperialism yet withered in a globalized era of free trade and foreign investment. Ukrainians given sight back settle into new life, 'We've spent years preparing our Comic-Con costumes' Video'We've spent years preparing our Comic-Con costumes', The woman who built a career from true crime and make-up, Whisky makers are turning their backs on peat, No faith in Russia, Germany scrambles for energy, Most of us don't clean our teeth in the right way, Why dark Japanese fairy tale Princess Mononoke was too much for Hollywood, Some street vendors say moonlight and dew are the magic ingredients. An adversary who cannot be deterred and whose attacks cannot be defended against must be stopped before it gains the capability to do great harm. They argued that nuclear warheads were immensely destructive but not qualitatively different from previous weapons of warfare. Relations between Russia and the West have deteriorated in recent years. Critics like military strategists Herman Kahn and Colin Gray disagreed. But U.S. allies, West Germany in particular, convinced America that the SS-20 demanded an urgent American counter. Both countries possessed seemingly secure second-strike forces of such size that, no matter how well they executed a first strike, neither would escape a devastating retaliatory blow. But the threat of nuclear annihilation remains real. The threat of the military-industrial complex is taken seriously only in Hollywood films and on conspiracy newsgroups. Competition made good strategic sense because policymakers had doubts about the survivability of nuclear arsenals; the political and territorial status quo did not always seem clear or obvious; and strategists on both sides could never know for certain that their adversary believed in MAD. "At least several hundred American and Russian nuclear missiles remain on 'hard alert' capable of being launched within minutes.
Mutual assured destruction kept the two Cold War superpowers in check but offers little assurance to nations threatened by suicide terrorists. American officials did not express confidence in MAD, as predicted by the theory of the nuclear revolution. "The fear of nuclear war has diminished partly because the risk has receded significantly with the end of the Cold War," says Nick Bostrom, director of Oxford University's Future of Humanity Institute. For instance, "rogue states," like North Korea and Iran, are striving to develop nuclear missiles, perhaps in the hope that they will be able to at least inflict severe damage on an enemy before they are annihilated by a nuclear counterstrike a partial application of the MAD doctrine, according to a 2019 analysis by the U.S. Department of Defense (opens in new tab). FOREIGN POLICY has invited six notable minds to sort through the dustbin of history and share what they found. And the improved accuracy of U.S. forces would offset Soviet advantages in land-based ICBMs. But the fear of a war in which the aim is to wipe out the entire population of an enemy has startlingly diminished. Is Europe set for its worst wildfire season? Similarly, from the Office of Net Assessment the highly influential Defense Department strategist Andrew Marshall commissioned and conducted studies to investigate how the United States could most effectively compete with the Soviet Union. NY 10036. In the same year, Nato's military planning operation Able Archer led some Russian commanders to conclude that a Nato nuclear launch was imminent. For example, the Reagan administration seemed far more ruthless in its pursuit of American qualitative superiority when it began negotiations with the Soviets on the Strategic Arms Reductions Talks (START) than the Nixon and Ford administrations did during the SALT process. *The US line only includes warheads in the Department of Defense stockpile, which was declassified in May 2010. In their view, too much uncertainty surrounded the requirements of nuclear deterrence, including the survivability of nuclear forces. Eight months after McNamara's speech the notion of MAD was almost put to the test by the Cuban Missile Crisis. By 2004, a report (opens in new tab) for the Strategic Studies Institute of the U.S. Army War College had declared,"nuclear Mutual Assured Destruction thinking appears to be in decline," with the U.S. planning to develop more accurate nuclear weapons that would reduce the number of civilians killed in a nuclear strike. It wasnt just a question of damage-limiting; I believedand still dothat 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. Why did leaders in the United States, NATO, and the Soviet Union not take comfort in MAD?
After finishing this masterly work, I am left with three main thoughts. He warned. The perception of U.S. NATO allies of the credibility of the American deterrent, for example, seems to have also played an important role in shaping American policy. 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. Because nuclear arsenals remained secure, the cost of war was too high to risk competition. Theorists of the nuclear revolution discount the uncertainty about the survivability of nuclear arsenals that can arise with improvements in military technology. Even those who disagreed had little reason to resurrect MAD in the aftermath of the Cold War.
However, a nuclear war could begin if the Indian government launched a large military incursion aimed at destroying terrorist camps or punishing Pakistan for supporting these groups. Policymakers Largely Got It Right: Deterrence During the Cold War Was Not Easy. Dependency theory thrived amidst a backlash against economic imperialism yet withered in a globalized era of free trade and foreign investment. According to MAD, trying to protect yourself is destabilizing because it threatens the other side. If Green is right, and I think he is, his work calls into question the alleged benefits that should arise when nuclear-armed powers live under the condition of mutually assured destruction. But that MAD number rapidly increased, and by the time of the Carter administration in 1977, military planners argued that the U.S. needed 2,000 nuclear warheads. This handwringing seems misplaced, given that we now know that the United States had serious advantages in nuclear weapons capabilities going into the 1960s. Some have speculated Saudi Arabia could follow if Iran succeeds and it's been suggested that Israel already has more than 100 warheads. We begin bombing in five minutes.". Taken together with advances in communication, surveillance, and precision, America fielded an impressive array of counterforce capabilities. The authorities tried to offer reassurance. As a former student of Charles Glaser, this, on the one hand, comes as somewhat of a shock. As he explained: To go after cities, if deterrence should fail, to my mind would be suicidal. Decades after the end of the Cold War, scholars have begun to cast doubt on the things that I learned in graduate school about nuclear weapons, especially the notion that the condition of mutually assured destruction (MAD) should promote stability among the great powers. Editors Note: This is an excerpt from Book Review Roundtable: The Revolution that Failed from our sister publication, the Texas National Security Review. According to Darwinism, species that adapt to their environment thrive; those that fail to evolve face extinction. Children speculated in the playground about the first signs of a nuclear attack - hair and fingernails falling out - and whether one could survive a nuclear winter. The costs of war would be very high if they were wrong. Economics. Surely there must be more going on here than simply the suboptimal behavior of dunderheaded policymakers? If the theory is so powerful, then why can it not explain the Cold War arms race? The Revolution that Failed should remind us that when it comes to nuclear weapons, such competitions are difficult and dangerous. Thus the true philosophy of nuclear deterrence was established. Trump chose not to act during Capitol riot, committee says, Ukraine and Russia 'poised to sign grain deal', Russia about to run out of steam in Ukraine - MI6. Sometimes the black humour emanated from unlikely places. For instance, a 2012 study by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists found that just 100 nuclear detonations of the size that struck Hiroshima and Nagasaki would usher in a planetary nuclear winter, which would drop temperatures lower than they were in the Little Ice Age, Live Science previously reported.). NEW FOR SUBSCRIBERS: These would permit the United States to exploit vulnerabilities in Soviet nuclear-armed bombers and submarines. Source: Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. The Club of Romes doomsday prophecies of global starvation are now starved for credibility. Cold War nuclear weapons policy: a cycle of optimism and pessimism about the state of the nuclear competition. In theory, the U.S. government could concoct a minimalist form of MAD by threatening retaliation in the form of killing terrorists families or destroying Muslim holy sites. President Kennedy's Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, set out in a speech to the American Bar Foundation a theory of flexible nuclear response. The term "assured destruction" was first used in the 1960s by then-U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, who served in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. Read about our approach to external linking. At other times, the sky was falling. Indeed, even the simplest missiles are difficult to intercept. But predicting the future accurately is quite difficult. Mutual assured destruction kept the two Cold War superpowers in check but offers little assurance to nations threatened by suicide terrorists. My informed hunch tells me that there is much that Greens argument can explain about the periods of history that preceded and followed that decade. What human-made structures can be seen from space? Expand your perspective with unlimited access to FP. In the event of a Soviet attack the US would have enough nuclear firepower to survive a first wave of nuclear strikes and strike back. Stephanie Serrano). A U.S. Titan nuclear missile. (Image credit: Michael Dunning via Getty Images), End of the world? Ironically, primitive warheads that tumble in flight the very types of missiles that might be launched by low-tech U.S. adversaries such as Iraq or North Korea are harder to track than are more sophisticated ones. Live Science is supported by its audience. For example, optimists about nuclear proliferation need to exercise greater caution about the spread of nuclear weapons if they engender competition rather than peace. On the set of Stanley Kubrick's Dr Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, Protesters in Khrushchev and Kennedy masks in 1962, 'We've spent years preparing our Comic-Con costumes' Video, 'We've spent years preparing our Comic-Con costumes', New telescope catches dead suns smashing together, Russia 'looting' steel bound for Europe and UK, US reports first polio case in nearly a decade, Ex-policeman jailed for George Floyd killing role, Chappelle show cancelled over joke controversy, Sri Lankan forces raid anti-government camp. Moving before the threat fully materializes is rational only if the government is quite certain that failing to do so will lead to a disastrous attack by an adversary. Jasen Castillo is an associate professor and the Evelyn and Ed F. Kruse 49 Faculty Fellow in the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University, as well as the co-director of the Albritton Center for Grand Strategy. Brendan Rittenhouse Green, The Revolution that Failed: Nuclear Competition, Arms Control, and the Cold War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020). The Taliban Detained Me for Doing My Job. U.S. officials displayed great sensitivity to the concerns of Washingtons allies.
According to a 2007 study in the journal Asian Affairs: An American Review (opens in new tab), China, the third nuclear superpower, does not have the capacity to threaten true mutually assured destruction because its relatively small arsenal of nuclear missiles does not have a credible "second strike" capability, which would be needed to automatically respond to a nuclear attack.
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. There are concerns about Iran and North Korea's nuclear programmes and fears that terrorists might get hold of a nuclear bomb. They could also not know with enough certainty if the Soviets agreed about the virtues of MAD. Not only is this volume a balm for my distress, it also makes two important contributions to our understanding of nuclear deterrence during the Cold War. In 1983 there were a number of Russian false alarms. Several thousand additional retired but intact warheads are awaiting dismantling, probably 3,500-4,500 as of August 2010. Nonetheless, being on the receiving end of any kind of Soviet retaliatory strike seems unpleasant, to put it mildly. These are modern fears that John F Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev, leading the superpowers at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, would struggle to comprehend.
In certain scenarios, deterrence still works to some degree. The fear of impending attack became a part of everyday conversation. But these options are politically unpalatable. Mutual assured destruction is the concept of nuclear superpowers being able to completely destroy each other. Throughout his career, Nitze dismissed the deterrent value of MAD. These advantages translated into a preference for qualitative arms races. Instead, the Bush administration sees (or perhaps is looking for) significant preemptive military uses for nuclear weapons, such as destroying an adversarys wmd sites (silos or weapons facilities) that are buried deep underground. Applying the Theory Before and After the 1970s. The Soviet Union's early warning system mistakenly picked up a US missile coming into USSR airspace. Live Science is part of Future US Inc, an international media group and leading digital publisher. This would assure effective deterrence. Striking first in conditions of mutually assured retaliation, however, might to a certain extent pay off, depending on the vulnerabilities of an adversarys arsenal, something an opponent will also realize. The Revolution that Failed is quite good at illustrating the U.S. technological improvements that were made during the 1970s, which gave Washington the ability to significantly limit damage to itself in a nuclear exchange. But complete annihilation of an enemy is not the only way MAD comes into play. For instance, it would be suicidal for Pakistan to attack India with nuclear weapons. Asian values -- fashionable when South Korea and Thailand were economic success stories and the West was mired in recession -- lost their luster following the 1997 Asian financial crisis. A top Russia advisor to three U.S. presidents explains why the world shouldnt fall for Moscows narrative that it can wait out the West in Ukraine. The Dustbin of History: Mutual Assured Destruction. 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. Click + to receive email alerts when new stories are published on, Ukraine Has Ground Down Russias Arms Business, Chinas Strategy Needs Study, Not Assumptions. And when the Carter administration pushed its countervailing strategy in the late 1970s, the Joint Chiefs of Staff complained, in Janne Nolans words, that the United States still did not have the forces to execute these even more elaborate civilian fantasies.. The most serious stand-off today is not the US and Russia but the prospect of a nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan in which "tens of millions would die", Rogers suggests. By Since the end of the Cold War, the superpowers have taken steps to limit their nuclear arsenals. Under MAD, striking preemptively in a crisis is futile, since neither side can limit damage to itself. One fact that clearly emerges from Greens book is that policymakers seemed to correctly understand the dynamics of Cold War nuclear deterrence. It is a clue to the eventual demise of mutual assured destruction (MAD) that the term was coined by a critic who sought to highlight how ludicrous the concept was. Even if Pakistan were able to destroy Indias nuclear stockpile, Indias armed forces could still dismember Pakistan. The concept of mutual assured destruction even made it to the movies. Perhaps that is the beauty of Greens argument. In theory, under mutual assured destruction, a nuclear attack by one superpower will be met with an overwhelming nuclear counterattack by their target using early warning systems, automated missiles, airborne nuclear bombs, and missile-armed hidden submarines. Proponents of Reagans anti-MAD policies credited them with helping to bring down the Soviet empire. My hunch is that nuclear competition would have still taken place contrary to the dictates of the theory of the nuclear revolution but that the arms race would have developed with significantly less intensity. Economics 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. Moreover, the jury is still out on how many nuclear weapons detonations would cause a nuclear winter. The Cold War nuclear balance was delicate both before and after the 1970s. McNamara estimated that a nuclear strike force with the equivalent explosive power of 400 megatons of TNT a "few hundred" missiles, as some military planners said was needed to ensure an effective nuclear deterrence, according to the Brookings Institution (opens in new tab). Future US, Inc. Full 7th Floor, 130 West 42nd Street, The ghost of MAD remains even if people would rather not think about it. The Pakistanis might decide, in turn, to use nuclear weapons on their own soil against invading forces. Beating up on the theory of the nuclear revolution has become a popular enterprise these days. It was later satirised by When the Wind Blows, which portrayed an elderly couple building their shelter and perishing in the nuclear aftermath. This strategy makes more sense in theory than in practice, however. For many analysts the world is now a less stable place than it was during the Cold War. Heres why you can trust us. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. I think that the answer is more political than technical. A similar vacillation occurred with respect to the balance of intermediate-range nuclear forces in Europe. For this reason, it is not especially surprising that policymakers rode an emotional rollercoaster. And if anything, these studies probably downplayed the effects of mass fires.