From 1959 to 1963, our family lived at Vandenberg AFB, CA, where my dad was stationed. As a kid attending grade schools on base, we would run outside of the classroom whenever a missile was launched. The ground rumbling would cause a cry from everyone, “MISSILE!” and we’d go see the con trail. Even as little children, we knew from the launch site the type of missile. It was kinda cool when a missile would go off course and they’d blow it up.
I remember CONELRAD, the Emergency Broadcast System alerts, Duck and Cover drills, fallout shelters, and the mushroom cloud. There was a pervasive fear that we kids picked up.
I remember asking my mother if WE would build a fallout shelter. I didn’t understand that Base Housing meant we were “renting” our home.
Instead of explaining the housing situation, my mother said there was no need for fallout shelters where we lived. She said the air force base would be one of the first places bombed, and all that would be left would be a big crater.
Dr Strangelove and Fail-Safe both came out in 1964. both films concerned an unintentional, on the part of the government as far as intented war, use of nuclear weapons. Strangelove a black comedy that was hooked onto some reality. Fail-Safe was a drama of a potential sequence of events. Strangelove came out first. Fail-Safe though good maybe was too real and didn’t do well.
Fail-Safe was given another go around in the theaters. i saw it as a double feature along with The War Game a 1965 BBC tv drama as a documentary, about just before and after a nuclear attack on Britain. it was pulled from broadcast in Britain because it was too depressing; which it was. it was a double feature that just kind of stuck with you.
I have not failed to notice your insistence on using the term “Assured Destruction”
rather than the term “Mutual Assured Destruction” (MAD) which I have been using.
I think it is time to see if any internet citations contradict anything I have been
saying about the term:
The Wiki article goes on to say that MAD was a component of US strategy even
during the Carter administration, when it was the fallback position. It would have
been undermined by SDI, but SDI was never implemented, so MAD must have
remained in effect, and it must remain in effect today.
If Wiki is too hoi polloi for someone of your erudition, then maybe this scholarly
tome will be more to your liking:
Finally in decline (and not extinguished) in 2004, eh? That was the cite’s
introductory preface sentence, published 2004, and here is the first sentence
of the second paragraph:
And here, from page 3 of the introduction:
Can you agree, Stranger, that this cite considers MAD to have been have been a
dominant strategic factor in the past, and that its influence was still in effect in 2004?
Now, I can just imagine your gears cranking up preparing to spew accusation to the
effect that I am cherry picking from a source I have not read cover to cover. Well,
my answer to that is that I got all the information I needed by the middle of page 3
of the introduction, so why rub it in any more?
And here is a third and final representative cite explaining what it is to be MAD:
So, yes, we were lucky, but as I have been saying all along, if we had not been
diligent and professional then no amount of luck could have saved us, and diligence
and professionalism were the servants of MAD, at least according to two Secretaries of State and two Secretaries of Defense.
Addressed above.
Addressed above.
I do not understand this jargon-laden section; I doubt it is important enough
to need to be understood.
Even if this was true in theory it was honored only in the breach, as Petrov and all
other examples prove: When Petrov, SAC and others were warned, Petrov, SAC and
others did not launch. So “launch on warning” was not followed in practice, regardless
of whether it was an official strategic policy mandate.
Referring to deterrence value at all signifies the existence of MAD strategy.
And overstated or not, there was no reasonable alternative until the Gorbachev
era, when the USSR agreed to flyovers and inspection of its facilities.
Cite please, in their own words, as I have provided, if anyone has suggested
a hierarchy where luck was most decisive.
McNamara in particular, and by his own admission, never seems to have made a right move.
That makes him the least credible of all authorities.
Although the wisdom of commitment to a policy of vast overkill is not part of this
debate, I will say that since the USSR was opposed to inspection it was therefore
essential to possess assured ability to inflict catastrophic damage on it. Thus even
if McNamara changed his mind about the Minuteman and the Polaris, he is only
being wrong again, in conformance with the rest of his career as a public figure.
Of course there could be no security compared to bygone eras, but ICBM SLBM and
manned bombers provided the best security then available, which lay in MAD, to
which McNamara signed wholeheartedly on with, in conformance with American policy
in effect to this day.
My argument is inductive, not deductive:
Observation: There were no nuclear wars during the Cold War, despite more than one false alarm.
Observation: MAD was strategic doctrine for both sides, and MAD was also definitely in effect
in the minds of all those whose personal responsibility it was to push the button.
Conclusion: Therefore it is reasonable to hypothesize that MAD was a decisive factor in preventing
the button from ever being pushed.
Another Straw Man.
I never said or implied there was no potential for catastrophic error. There obviously
is such a potential, and no need to apply sophisticated mathematics to recognize it.
Wiki indicates there is considerable confusion and contradictory opinion and statement
on this matter. Apparently it is not kept on routinely, all the time, but is only made
available during crisis. The key to whether it is semi-automatic is whether a Dead Hand
launch order can be countermanded. Hopefully no one could ever be crazy enough to deploy
a system segregated from the ultimate, real-time responsibility and control of human beings.
Born in the 1950’s. I remember air-raid drills when I was in elementary school. In some, we crawled under desks, others where we sat on the floor in the hallways. They were fun breaks from routine, and never caused me anxiety. The concept of nuclear war never had any reality for me.
I was referring to the post-Cold War situation, and I think the absurdity of the idea of an attack
must have weighed on Yesltsin’s mind when he decided not to launch on warning.
Also, the entire Missile Crisis was by definition a warning in and of itself: warning was in effect
from both sides. All you had to do was read the newspapers to know it.
I read Rhodes’ books over 15 years ago. I could not pass a test on them now. IR he is good,
and trustworthy on the technical history. However, on policy he had on obvious agenda
to discredit Western leaders as much as possible.
I was born in 1963 and watched the news and kept up with current events during my teenage years probably as much as anyone that age during that time. I gave it your poll a “1”.
Assured Destruction is a well defined startegy with precepts that allow it to be simulated in an analytical environment divorced from the personalities. That strategy can be shown to be, at best, marginally stable provided that the “game” meets the prerequisites. Although Assured Destruction cannot be implemented in a rigorous fashion in a real world environment (as prerequisites such as complete information" and perfect detection can never be perfectly assured) it serves as a useful baseline for assessing the value and reliability of deterrence theory. In reality, no attempt at utilizing deterrence theory in the real world, either in the Cold War era or later, has really come close to meeting the requirements of Assured Destruction, and have fallen short in one or more ways that simulations based upon Assured Deterrence indicate are unstable.
What you term “Mutually Assured Destruction” is a collection of very different strategies for which the collective commonality is that they involve large arsenals of nuclear weapons and all are largely dependant upon the personalities involved to make not only informed but rational decisions under great pressure and time constraints. American strategy from the early storable ICBM era (deployment of the LGM-25C ‘Titan II’ in 1963) through the LGM-30A/B/F/G ‘Minuteman’ family of launchers, the MX/LGM-118A ‘Peacekeeper’, and the abortive mobile MGM-134 ‘Midgeman’ Small ICBM has been highly fluid in terms of quantity, deployment, assurance from counterforce attack (e.g. a disarming first strike), et cetera. This was most obvious in the Scowcroft Commission during President Reagan’s first term, which came up with new and increasingly impractical basing concepts on a nearly weekly basis to provide protection for the in-development Peacekeeper and the proposed “Mobile Minuteman” (what would become Midgetman), each with a unique justification in terms of deterrence value and required quantity. Similar post hoc shifts in justification have accompanied accuracy improvements in the Fleet Ballistic Missile program from the A-1/-2/-3 ‘Polaris’ through the C-3 ‘Posieden’ and the C-4 ‘Trident’ and D-5 ‘Trident II’. Although some tenets of Assured Destruction were a part of the various decisions on the development of ballistic missile and nuclear weapon technology (e.g. the emphasis on solid propellant boosters for rapid response, the focus on nuclear powered submarine ballistic missile carriers capable of making “deterrence patrols” of several months duration) the decisions on how and where to deploy these systems were almost exclusively political and financial in nature.
The Soviet Union, in their internal planning, never relied upon “MAD” at all, and assumed that their distribution of population, hidden stockpiles of weapons and weapon-production facilities, and failure to advertise ostensibly deterrence-related systems such as the Perimeter system argue that they either didn’t understand the fundamentals of deterrence theory (unlikely, as post-Cold War insight indicates that Soviet knowledge of game theory and strategic modeling was at least as sophisticated as that of the West) or else did not subscribe to the merit of deterrence theory in assuring that NATO would not act unilaterally. Indeed, a misunderstanding of the motivations and bombast of Reagan (who was no advocate of nuclear proliferation and would most certainly have never initiated an unprovoked nuclear strike) led Soviet leaders and some military strategists to believe that a US-led NATO was looking for the opportunity to make a disarming strike, a scenario shockingly similar in retrospect to that which led to the the Cuban Missile Crisis.
We cannot either infer or deduce that “MAD” under either an explicit definition of strategic theory or the more open-ended and all-encompassing endorsement of the ad hoc strategic dsystems of the United States and Soviet Union during the Cold War. We can look at the known incidents that did occur and note that many were averted not because of systematic checks and balances but because individuals involved had specific knowledge or insight that allowed them to make a decision that an indicated threat was not valid. That reliance upon individual competence is a fragile hook to hang the safety and security of nations upon. As noted, many authorties who were directly involved in such incidents and were responsible for establishing or promoting such systems have since made the argument that luck played a significant factor in avderting war. You are, of course, free to hold a differing opinion and critique others for admitting to error or changing their positions, but history does not support the notion that leaders always act in the rational self-interest of their nations.
I’m sorry if the language I used confused you in any way, but I have attempted to avoid the use of any discipline specific jargon pertaining to either strategic deterrence or nuclear weapons, and where unavoidable I have tried to make the definition and context as explicit as possible. If there is any particular term that you do not understand I can expand on it for clarification.
I was plenty scared at first, but then I didn’t die when I was eight in October of 1962 so I just got sorta numb over it all. I would still rate the places I lived as primary and secondary targets and try to plan a way out of town, but I knew it was hopeless because I usually lived in the blast radius of a secondary target. The Cold War is what made me the cheerful person I am today.
Born in '47. Like others, I would not say “scared” was the word, but more “fatalistic.” With no ability to control events, I lived my life as if nothing would happen, with the knowledge that if something did, well, hard luck.
Did duck and cover in the '50s. Was jealous when my girlfriend’s class was selected to be models for posters showing how to crouch against walls, duck under desks, lie flat in open areas. My dad started to dig a bomb shelter, thought about it a little harder, and turned the hole into an extended septic tank.
Back when military jets could go supersonic over populated areas, I was in a high school class when a sonic boom bowed the classroom windows in. A classmate sitting next to me went white, and my 15-year-old self comforted her by saying, “Don’t worry, if it had been The Bomb, we would have had The Flash first.”
It is nice to have mostly shrugged off that fatalism.
I lived about 3 miles from a USAF satellite tracking station, so I figured that if there was an actual nuclear exchange, my town (only about 8,000 pop.) would be hit by a small-yield warhead in any first wave of launches. Close enough to have fires and broken windows and possible blindness to worry about, but not near enough to get vaporized. Of course, that would only be the immediate concerns…
As I recall, I didn’t think it was inevitable, but I did think it was not unlikely, and it was something that was always in the back of my mind, and occasionally would flare up into my consciousness (during the KAL 007 crisis, the “bombing begins in five minutes” Reagan joke, death of Brezhnez/Andropov/Chernenko, etc.). After we all saw Red Dawn, some friends and I played RPG games set in our own towns after the nukes and “inevitable” Warsaw Pact invasion.
We never had drills or anything like that, but I’ll never forget one rainy afternoon in early July '84, when my town tested out their Civil Defense warning siren. At that moment, and for a few minutes afterwards (when I realized no one else gave it much concern), I was fascinated and terrified.
Of course the real world is going to fall short of meeting the requirements of a “simulation” “divorced from the personalities”. That is why simulations are of limited and questionable value to policymakers who must provide for national security and manage international relations within the fog of historical events in progress.
It is a historical fact, documented in my last post, that Western policymakers felt deterrence was the best strategy available for promoting stability and averting calamity. And it is a historical fact, documented in my last post, that Western policymakers gave the name “Mutual Assured Destruction” to this strategy.
You infer from your “analytical environment” that MAD is so deficient only luck has saved us.
I infer from the historical fact of a real-world 63-year nuclear peace that our luck could not have held out for so long despite numerous false alarms, and that there is likely to have been much more than luck at work.
No, what me and many others term MAD is not a collection of strategies. It is a singular, simple strategy: Possession of means to destroy an attacker who has the means to destroy us is likely to deter attack.
I do not see how any of this addresses or rebuts any argument I have made.
Our nuclear submarines were assigned patrol routes bases on politics? I don’t see how, aside from having to keep them out of some ports such as Sasebo, Japan. If you are suggesting the US leadership would have compromised what it perceived as our security needs then I call bullshit, and no documentation is ever going to make that kind of bullshit smell like roses.
The passage above is incoherently written.
Nothing in it establishes beyond mere assertion that the USSR did not rely on MAD, and If it did not rely on MAD what did it rely on?
It occurs to me to go so far as to say I do not see how a rational Cold War Soviet leadership could avoid relying on MAD. So they are unneverved by
Mr. Reagan’s “bombast”? Well then don’t those those hidden stockpiles have sort a MAD aroma about them?
Your wargaming fantasy land obviously does not like (M)AD. What alternative does it prefer, or does it tell us to just put our heads between our knees, etc.?
The “assurance” of MAD refers to an attainable assurance that the other side will suffer catastrophic damage in any nuclear exchange, regardless of who starts it. It does not refer an obviously unattainable assurance that the other side will not act unilaterally.
This implies the USSR was vulnerable to a disarming strike. I do not believe it was vulnerable to such, or could be made vulnerable absent SDI. No amount of bombast was going to deliver any SDI before Reagan left office, and the Politburo and their brass knew it.
I do not see the similarity of a 1980s US surprise attack with the CMC.
Addressed.
Specific individual knowledge and insight of are part of all check and balance systems. There are 1000s of people whose diligence, professionalism, knowledge and insight were relied on, and are still relied on in the 63 years total since the nuclear WMD era went bipolar.
Individual competence has been a preeminent factor in all forms of human endeavor throughout human history. Our lives will always depend as much on it as upon anything.
You would prefer a robot?
I do not contest the existence of luck. I do contest its dominance.
I prefer the authority cited there to any you have offered.
I am not critiquing everyone, only the inadequate authorities you are basing your arguments on.
History supports the notion that the Cold War leaders on both sides tried to act in the rational self-interest of their countries, and considered themselves to be doing so. Of course they may at times have had unsound perceptions of what their self-interest really consisted of. And of course they made mistakes. That does not include MAD, which was unavoidable until the reforms of Glasnost.
Never mind. I think you made the same point in that section where I said bullshit was never going to smell like roses.
I’m probably neither the first nor the last to make this gallows-humor observation, but for me it was to the point where I had given up wishing that we weren’t all going to die; instead I was wishing that if we’re going to die, couldn’t it be before the Algebra test?
I was fairly terrified from about 3rd grade through about 5th grade (1981-1983), but sometime around there, things like girls, sports and boy scouts took center stage.
By the time high school rolled around, I’d read enough to realize that the Soviets were in all likelihood, more scared of us than we were of them, due to their WWII experience. I quit worrying at that point and actually started thinking seriously about a military career, since the Cold War seemed like it would drag on indefinitely, but it up and ended right about the middle of my Junior year. I ended up scrapping that idea, on the theory that the military would be reduced to 1920’s levels post Cold War. Had I realized how things would play out, I’d have gone for it full-tilt.
In this statement, you seem to misunderstand the entire point of deterrence theory (as opposed to theories of combat tactics and strategy); Assured Deterrence (or MAD, or whatever moniker you prefer to apply) is intended to present to an opponent the scenario that no matter how unexpected, massive, or devastating an attack, the subsequent and unstoppable reprisal will result in the complete annihilation of the attack, and thus, prevent such an attack being rationally conceivable. If missiles start flying for whatever reason, the theory has failed as a deterrent by definion. As both the United States and the Soviet Union employed contingency measures to provide a degree of survivability from a nuclear exchange, and conceived and practiced scenarios of limited exchange, it is clear that neither power uniformly embraced Assured Destruction (or MAD).
And until the deployment of the R-36M heavy ICBM with large MIRV capabiltiy (8-10 RVs) in the mid-'Seventies the Soviet Union did not enjoy parity with the United States in terms of delivery systems and responsiveness, a fact well known to US military strategists and administrations prior to that point despite the campaign harping by Kennedy about the mythological “missile gap”. (It was, in fact, that spurred development of the MX/Peacekeeper and Mobile Minuteman/SICBM programs.) Up to that point, US strategists believed a nuclear exchange would be destructive but winnable by the NATO forces, and frankly, they were probably correct (although Europe would have been devestated).
It was only at this point that sufficient parity of forces and total destructive capability existed such as destruction of both sides could be “assured”, and at least some Soviet studies (rightly or otherwise) projected survivability of the Soviet Union from even the most blistering US attack. So, while American deterrence theory at that time may be credited with having some elements of Assured Deterrence (but still planning for a post-exchange response or a limited exchange), Soviet strategic theory did not. After the Soviet buildup of ICBMs and readily launchable SLBMs in the mid-'Seventies, the converse was true; American strategic thinking shifted from deterrence to limiting the damage in an exchange and providing for greater capability to respond in a protracted exchange, while Soviet planning focused on systemic disruption to elimination US and NATO response. It may seem to you that “I do not see how a rational Cold War Soviet leadership could avoid relying on MAD,” but this speaks more to your own philosophical prejudices than Soviet doctrine, of which both what was known at that time and later available after the fall of the Soviet Union indicates that their primary objectives were not deterrence but survivability and disruption of the NATO response.
As you seem wedded to your opinion and find my statements to be “incoherent” and “bullshit” there seems to be little point in continuing this discussion. But a study of strategic doctrine during the Cold War indicates that the buildup of large arsenals had less to do with pure deterrence that a simplistic application of a “MAD”-type concept would suggest, and certainly the deployment of the nuclear triad in the US arsenal was less aobut having independent and assured response than vying within the military establishment for authority and budget.
Born in 1950 and raised in Canada. I delivered newspapers with headlines screaming on the Cuban missile crisis. Kennedy and Khrushchev were playing chicken and the Russian’s off the wall shoe banging did not give me confidence that he would back down. I KNEW Kennedy would stand fast. And this was in an era of air raid siren drills and duck and cover.
You bet I was scared.
But after it was over I felt we were unlikely to repeat with another hostle nuclear crisis. This was just too much.
I still believe we all dodged the big bullet there.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding your point here. There was no expectation that a reprisal for a first nuclear strike would destroy that first strike. MAD was to assure that there could be no victor in a first strike scenario, that there would a reprisal of sufficient strength to cause unacceptable damage to the first side to launch, even if that launch succeeded in destroying most of its targets. The idea was to take a first strike off the table of rational options, because there would be no advantage to it.
There were other scenarios where the US theoretically threatened a first nuclear strike of its own, intended to deter a massive Soviet conventional attack on Western Europe. From the West’s point of view, that was only tangentially related to MAD, as a response if the Soviets then launched a nuclear counter-strike. Of course, the Soviets would think of this scenario in MAD terms (or whatever they called it), because to them, their reprisal strike would be deterring the US’s first strike.
The US and NATO were always very closed-mouth about their nuclear option in the case of a conventional Soviet assault. They especially didn’t want it known (and maybe didn’t really know themselves) at what point they would give up on the idea of a conventional defense. And when and if they did, they still had at least two nuclear options, tactical battlefield nukes to use against Soviet military formations, or going Full Monty against the Soviet homeland.
Born 1974. It was always a nagging sort of worry when I was a kid. It didn’t seem inevitable, but the possibility was always there that in 20 minutes my world would end. I lived in Stockton from age 9 or 10. Rough and Ready Island is a major Naval communications hub. It was almost certainly a first-strike target, so I and everyone I knew would die right away.
Forgot to mention: I voted a 3. I wasn’t particularly scared at all until Reagan got into office. His combination of bravado, military adventurism and stupidity scared the Soviets and me too.