TransWorld

The US nuclear weapons deterred other enemy countries from dropping nuclear weapons they had on other countries, allies, and the US. MAD (Mutual Assured Destruction) actually works, wether it is with someone who will punch back in a street fight or with nuclear weapons.

MaxQ

Transworld,

It works until it doesn't.

Partly due to how nuclear weapons have been, and likely still are, used in international politics; partly due to chaos theory;
partly due to laws of probability; and partly due to possible breakdown of industrial civilization from global warming/resource depletion/insolvent world economy I have my doubts as to MAD working forever. Considering the consequences of it's failing
I hope my doubts never prove true.
As long as the 2 largest nuclear powers mutually use MAD we can not know that it will work.
It only has so far.

rickair7777

There's no other alternative, can't put the genie back in the bottle.

Nobody expects MAD to work perfectly, or prevent all use of nuclear weapons. I almost expect at least one will get used this century. But lower-tier nuclear powers having a small nuclear exchange does not equate to Armageddon, and neither does nuclear terrorism. I'm pretty sure even major powers could get in a tactical nuclear exchange and still walk it back.

What MAD does accomplish is stability, and compared to the cold war and USSR, the US and especially Russia are far more methodical and much further away from the brink (same for China, which is growing its arsenal). Processes are much more measured and deliberate, there's definitely not a hair trigger mentality. None of the major powers have any kind of fanatical idealogy any longer, and their leaders want to enjoy power over a thriving economy... they don't want to preside (via zoom from a bunker) over a devastated nation.

Now what we can (and should) do to reduce risk of accident (and severity if there's ever an all-out nuclear exchange) is to cut arsenals to the absolute minimum size necessary to ensure credible deterrence and first-strike survival. Can't get the genie back in the bottle, but we don't have to let it run amuck either. Arsenal size has to be balanced with ABM defenses... you need enough ABM to catch small numbers of shots (accidental or rogue nation) but not so much that you significantly degrade the other guy's deterrence. Our ABM capabilities are encouraging both Russia and China to improve arsenals and delivery systems.

There's simply no reality where the major powers can eliminate all weapons and trust each other. Plus then you'd have to get all the OTHER nations to renounce it, with verification procedures. Frankly Russia, China, and the US are too big to have any hope of being able to adequately verify that nobodies building bombs and missiles in the vastness of Mongolia, Siberia, or the western US. The problem needs to be managed, aggressively.

MaxQ

Hi Rick,

While my thoughts don't amount to a hill of beans (least of all posted on an obscure pilot board), I decided to try and give a bit of a reply to your lengthy one to myself. Hopefully it communicates a bit of my thinking on the subject.


The post you replied to was refuting the idea that MAD works. We truly don't know if it will work, and would only have a definitive answer if it fails.


Though you started out by stating that there is no alternative, you then proceeded to lay out some ideas of the only viable alternative that I have come up with, or heard from others.

You correctly point out some problems with complete nuclear disarmament. There are others and I have some disagreements on some details you suggest as to how use of nuclear weapons might play out. But those are irrelevant to the main idea of MAD. It doesn't matter if any of our thought scenarios comport with what could happen.


The Alternative: the only one with a current political possibility is what you suggested. The minimum number of weapons to provide a deterrence to nuclear attack.

With the current arsenals an all out nuclear war(which MAD is hoped to prevent)would almost surely lead to the end of civilization, and if nuclear winter is triggered possibly the extinction of Homo Sapiens Sapiens. Creating a system where it's activation would cause such an outcome is truly madness, and I would argue only possible in societies that have lost sight of the lines between Good and Evil.


A war with only the minimum deterrence available for use would have horrific results, but possibly Civilization would survive.

I have coined it MAR...Mutually Assured Retaliation. (kind of what I assume is the aim of North Korea and China)

It would take massive work and out of the box thinking by all involved. (maybe even coloring outside the lines!)

For now it is the only plausible route I am aware of that could slide Civilization, and even mankind itself, out from under the proverbial Sword of Damocles.

For what it's worth

nimslow

I say we have done a bang up job with the climate. A mere 43 years and we have prevented the coming of the second ice age.


Leonard Nimoy warns of the coming ice age.

rickair7777

Yes, I remember that was a thing when I was a kid.

TransWorld

A cover of Newsweek in 1975 had a headline, “The Coming Ice Age”. If I recall the photo was of an iceberg.

Excargodog

TransWorld

“97% of all scientists agree that man made climate change (used to be global warming) is real. Anyone who disagrees is a climate denier, is a crackpot, and needs to be shut up.”

If one goes back and looks at the scientific articles published, only one fourth of the papers say man made climate change is real. A vast majority say maybe or maybe not, science is not clear, we just don’t know, we cannot conclude anything, please give us more money to study it.

This is the truth. I have read their analysis and background material. The politicians and media have twisted it and reported the 97% number, refusing to let the other information to be aired.

NASA is now saying they predict global cooling, due to diminished sun activity, part of its normal cycle of activity. That is directly contrary to what is stated, above.

Tom Bradys Cat

One in Four. Wow. I thought there was agreement.