Mutual Assured Destruction: Strategies Tactics and the Balance of Power in Nuclear Warfare

By Fouad Sabry

What is Mutual Assured Destruction

Mutual assured destruction (MAD) is a doctrine of military strategy and national security policy which posits that a full-scale use of nuclear weapons by an attacker on a nuclear-armed defender with second-strike capabilities would result in the complete annihilation of both the attacker and the defender. It is based on the theory of rational deterrence, which holds that the threat of using strong weapons against the enemy prevents the enemy's use of those same weapons. The strategy is a form of Nash equilibrium in which, once armed, neither side has any incentive to initiate a conflict or to disarm.

How you will benefit

(I) Insights, and validations about the following topics:

Chapter 1: Mutual assured destruction

Chapter 2: Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty

Chapter 3: Strategic Defense Initiative

Chapter 4: First strike (nuclear strategy)

Chapter 5: Minimal deterrence

Chapter 6: Nuclear strategy

Chapter 7: Nuclear utilization target selection

Chapter 8: Fail-deadly

Chapter 9: Nuclear arms race

Chapter 10: Massive retaliation

(II) Answering the public top questions about mutual assured destruction.

Who this book is for

Professionals, undergraduate and graduate students, enthusiasts, hobbyists, and those who want to go beyond basic knowledge or information for any kind of Mutual Assured Destruction.

• Language: English
• Publisher: One Billion Knowledgeable
• Release date: Jun 19, 2024

Book preview

Chapter 1: Mutual assured destruction

Mutual assured destruction (MAD) is a military strategy and national security policy premised on the idea that a full-scale deployment of nuclear weapons by an aggressor against a nuclear-armed defender with second-strike capabilities would result in the annihilation of both the aggressor and the defender. It is based on the rational deterrence principle, which states that the threat of employing powerful weapons against the opponent discourages the enemy from using those same weapons. The strategy is a sort of Nash equilibrium in which neither party has any motivation to launch a conflict or disarm once armed.

Donald Brennan, a strategist working for Herman Kahn's Hudson Institute in 1962, created the term mutually assured destruction, frequently shortened MAD..

Under MAD, each side possesses sufficient nuclear weapons to annihilate the other. If attacked by the opposing side for any cause, each side would respond with equal or greater power. The intended outcome is a rapid, irreversible escalation of hostilities leading to the mutual, total, and certain destruction of both combatants. The theory mandates that neither side construct large shelters. The identical argument is made against missile defense.

Further, the doctrine posits that neither side will launch a first strike because the other side will fire on warning (also known as fail-deadly) or with surviving troops (a second strike), resulting in intolerable losses for both sides. The predicted outcome of the MAD philosophy was and remains a strained but stable global peace. However, many have contended that mutually guaranteed destruction cannot discourage an escalating conventional war. Emerging fields of cyber-espionage, proxy-state conflict, and high-velocity missiles pose a danger to MAD as a deterrence technique.

The principal implementation of this ideology began during the Cold War (1940s to 1991), when it was viewed as aiding in the prevention of direct large-scale confrontations between the United States and the Soviet Union as they fought smaller proxy wars around the world. It was also responsible for the arms race, as both countries strove to maintain nuclear parity or, at the very least, second-strike capabilities. Despite the conclusion of the Cold War in the early 1990s, the MAD ideology remains in effect.

Proponents of MAD as part of the United States and Soviet Union's strategic doctrine felt that nuclear war could be avoided most effectively if no side could expect to survive a full-scale nuclear exchange. Since the legitimacy of the threat is essential for such assurance, each side was required to make enormous investments in their nuclear arsenals, even if they were never intended to be employed. In addition, neither side could be expected or permitted to defend itself sufficiently against the nuclear missiles of the other. This resulted in the hardening and diversification of nuclear delivery systems (such as nuclear missile silos, ballistic missile submarines, and nuclear bombers maintained at fail-safe positions) as well as the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.

This MAD scenario is frequently called reasonable nuclear deterrence.

Mutually assured destruction theory

Theorists began to believe that mutual assured destruction would be sufficient to discourage the other side from firing a nuclear weapon when the danger of nuclear warfare between the United States and Soviet Union began to become a reality. Kenneth Waltz, an American political scientist, argued that nuclear forces were in fact helpful, but much more so since they stopped other nuclear threats from using them on the basis of mutually assured destruction. The premise of mutually assured destruction as a secure method of deterrence was further supported by the belief that nuclear weapons designed to win a war were unrealistic, as well as too dangerous and risky.

Before the creation of nuclear weapons, the concept of MAD had been debated in scholarly works for nearly a century. At the period of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, the English author Wilkie Collins wrote: I begin to trust in only one civilizing influence—the discovery one of these days of a destructive agent so dreadful that War shall mean extinction and men's fears will force them to keep the peace. Tesla referred to his invention as a superweapon that would end all war.

The March 1940 Frisch–Peierls memorandum, the earliest technical description of a feasible nuclear weapon, foresaw deterrence as the primary method of nuclear warfare against an adversary.

The United States became the first nuclear power in August 1945, following the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. On August 29, 1949, four years later, the Soviet Union exploded its own nuclear bomb. At the time, neither side had the capability to employ nuclear weapons against the other. With the development of aircraft such as the American Convair B-36 and the Soviet Tupolev Tu-95, both sides gained the capability to deliver nuclear weapons into the interior of the opposing nation. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles invented the term Instant Retaliation, which called for a major atomic attack against the Soviet Union, regardless of whether it was a conventional or nuclear attack, if the Soviet Union were to invade Europe.

In the event of a Soviet first-strike attack on the United States, the United States Strategic Air Command (SAC) kept one-third of its bombers on alert, with crews prepared to take off within fifteen minutes to fly to predetermined targets inside the Soviet Union and destroy them with nuclear bombs. John F. Kennedy expanded funds for this initiative in 1961.

Early in the 1960s, United States Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara was principally responsible for announcing the MAD strategy. In McNamara's definition, there was a very real risk that a nuclear-armed nation could try to remove an adversary's retaliatory forces with a surprise, devastating first strike and conceivably win a nuclear war relatively unscathed. True second-strike capability could only be obtained if a nation has the ability to counterattack in full after a first-strike attack.

The United States had acquired an early type of second-strike capability by maintaining constant patrols of strategic nuclear bombers, with a significant number of planes always in the air, on their way to or from failsafe sites near the Soviet Union's frontiers. This meant that the United States could still respond to a deadly first strike. Due to the significant cost of having enough planes in the air at all times and the potential that they would be shot down by Soviet anti-aircraft missiles before reaching their targets, the strategy was costly and problematic. In addition, as the concept of a missile gap between the United States and the Soviet Union evolved, ICBMs gained precedence over bombers.

It was not until the introduction of ballistic missile submarines, beginning with the George Washington class in 1959, that a truly survivable nuclear force and a second strike capability were assured.

Due to their secrecy and the number fielded by each Cold War enemy, the deployment of ballistic missile submarine fleets constituted a guaranteed second-strike capability; it was exceedingly implausible that all of them could be targeted and preemptively destroyed (in contrast to, for example, a missile silo with a fixed location that could be targeted during a first strike). Submarines were plausible and effective methods for large-scale reprisal, even after a major first strike, because to their long range, great survivability, and capacity to carry multiple medium- and long-range nuclear missiles.

This deterrence concept and program have continued into the twenty-first century, with nuclear submarines carrying Trident II ballistic missiles serving as a component of the United States' strategic nuclear deterrent and as the United Kingdom's only deterrent. Other components of the US deterrent include nuclear-capable bombers and intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) on alert in the continental United States. The navy of China, France, India, and Russia all operate ballistic missile submarines.

The Department of Defense of the United States anticipates a sustained requirement for a sea-based strategic nuclear force.

Both the Soviet Union (with the A-35 anti-ballistic missile system) and the United States (with