Strategic analysts have criticized the doctrine of MAD for its inability to respond to the proliferation of space weaponry. President Kennedy's Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, set out in a speech to the American Bar Foundation a theory of flexible nuclear response. To avoid this, countries may design their nuclear forces to make decapitation strike almost impossible, by dispersing launchers over wide areas and using a combination of sea-based, air-based, underground, and mobile land-based launchers.

Mutually Assured Destruction? Game Theory and the Cold War Mutually Assured Destruction? Game Theory and the Cold War

As it turns out, though, the USSR had already built a Doomsday Device capable of wiping out all life on earth, to be detonated in the case of an attack, they just neglected to tell anyone about it. S. planning to develop more accurate nuclear weapons that would reduce the number of civilians killed in a nuclear strike. If the DEFCON scale reaches 1, then the player responsible for playing the card that started the sequence loses immediately. The krogan did it during the Krogan Rebellions, and indeed did render several worlds totally uninhabitable, but all that did was confirm that they had crossed an In-Universe Moral Event Horizon, which then justified the turians hitting back with their own banned WMD: a self-replicating bioweapon. North Korea agrees to hand over half their nuclear weapons to South Korea, so neither side can risk war without destroying themselves.

In 1962, the concept of mutually assured destruction started to play a major part in the defence policy of the US. policy that some other works merely mention is explored fully here: Some people might like the fail-state.

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No fallout shelter networks of sufficient capacity to protect large segments of the population and/or industry. Meanwhile, the theocracy running Bevelle couldn't use Vegnagun to conquer the world - or do anything with it, really - because Vegnagun was born insane and willing to nuke everything if it ever woke up. The evil part is that it would take isolationism to its logical extreme; every country would be run by military cults, while any hope of making a life in or getting help from another country would sooner result in a bloodbath. This led to the AI having a Heel Realization, relinquishing control of NORAD's nukes before it could launch them. In the final Quatermass series, the eponymous British scientist is not happy about his planned Moonbase being used to launch nuclear missiles for a proposed Dead Man deterrence strategy — the idea being that if an aggressor nuked Britain, missiles would launch from the Moon and wipe out the attacker three days later.It's Sick" and "The Incredible Shrinking Man" just mention the bomb in passing, while "Dance Stop" is all about the masses dancing while the bombs fall. Given their long-range, high survivability and ability to carry many medium- and long-range nuclear missiles, submarines were credible and effective means for full-scale retaliation even after a massive first strike. SDI was criticized by both the Soviets and many of America's allies (including Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Margaret Thatcher) because, were it ever operational and effective, it would have undermined the "assured destruction" required for MAD.

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Indeed, before the end of the Cold War, most academics thought the acronym "MAD" was appropriate - the strategy seemed insane. As such, this type of weapon was intended to be banned under the START II agreement; however, the START II agreement was never brought into force, and neither Russia nor the United States ratified the agreement. For example, if Russia feared a US nuclear attack, Moscow might make rash moves (such as putting its forces on alert) that would provoke a US preemptive strike. When the zebras were on the cusp of defeat, they used their megaspells, Equestria responded with their own, and that was the end. The March 1940 Frisch–Peierls memorandum, the earliest technical exposition of a practical nuclear weapon, anticipated deterrence as the principal means of combating an enemy with nuclear weapons.Judge Dredd shows why this doctrine wouldn't work if one side was led by an insane, jingoistic lunatic convinced that their country's way is the only way: American President Evil Robert L. The primary application of this doctrine started during the Cold War (1940s to 1991), in which MAD was seen as helping to prevent any direct full-scale conflicts between the United States and the Soviet Union while they engaged in smaller proxy wars around the world. Kenneth Waltz, an American political scientist, believed that nuclear forces were in fact useful, but even more useful in the fact that they deterred other nuclear threats from using them, based on mutually assured destruction.