- makes no sense whatsoever for all civilians. They pay for weapons to be used to destroy other civilians and escalate nuclear war. The strategy does not pay off for them either.
- makes no sense for the military. Mutual Assured Destruction does not win wars, strategically or tactically.
- does not happen in real life. The destruction of population centers and nuclear weapon facilities will not prevent nuclear retaliation or conventional retaliation, or reduce resistance. One side will emerge with the upper hand.
- is not assuring at all. Killing billions of people does not make the world safer.
2 comments:
Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) does work though, given all the players are sane. The fear is that some crazy guy might want to push the button.
It's likely that neither side will be better off after a nuclear strike. Nuclear submarines provide a second-strike capability, so that MAD is very much assured.
If the players were really sane, mutual assured destruction would not be considered a reasonable option. It's not even war. It's a "crime against humanity" many orders of ridiculous magnitude worse than all previous cases combined.
You cannot assume all players to be sane in this world, because as even economists realized, people are not sane, nor are groups of people.
The point of "mutual assured destruction" is not actually to win a war. It is to murder as many human beings as possible, while safe in a deep silo somewhere.
Nuclear submarines don't do all that much except for launching more nuclear weapons. The side that destroys more capabilities wins, and it's not going to be equal at all.
So everyone is destroyed, but some are more destroyed than others and that's important.
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