Nope. Launching nuclear missiles is not a crime of passion - murder generally is.
Now that toadspittle has cleaned up your flawed analogy, he’s also made it useless. Why would people stop murdering the way they’re doing now - with knives and guns and fists and bats - in favour of a way which guarantees they will be caught, and punished?
That’s interesting, Phoenix. You suppose the fuel bombs kill people less dead? Or are you suggesting that MAD isn’t what its all about when we still kill people anyway?
Not sure what you’re driving at here.
That’s a great question. Why would they?
Mutually Assured Destruction isn’t what worked. The U.S. was never going to launch a first-strike, it wasn’t ourselves that needed deterrence. It was the Soviets who might have been tempted to attack first, and our nuclear arsenal that deterred them. In other words, there were many things holding us back from launching a nuclear first-strike, even had we not been assured of our own destruction for doing so. For the Soviets, their own eventual destruction was probably the only thing holding them back. This isn’t MAD, it’s just deterrence for those predisposed to violence.
Similiarly, there’s no reason to expose people who would never be tempted to commit murder to an increased possibility of being murdered by someone willing to pay the price in possible retaliation, but also get the chance to escape scot-free. Nuclear policy only need deter the villians (Russia, China), just as criminal justice needs to focus its deterrence on those with murder on their minds.
Only one chit? I could use a dozen.
After reading the OP and toadspittle’s ideas, I submit this:
We take toad’s idea further. Instead of killing the individual using the poison, you kill the individual’s immediate family. There’s always a rather pathetic chance at surviving a nuclear war, so now, let’s make it personal. If you get “struck”, only you live, but you have to protect your family. . . Sure, you could piss someone off, but you personally would have to live with the consequences.
Sorta like how the powers that be would be secure in a nuclear bunker while the rest of the population gets turned into crispy toast.
Tripler
I’m sure that would start showing some true colors in certain people. . .
Why does this seem at odds with your following analysis of the Super-Evil Commies not roasting us on a fission fire (mushroom clouds nipping at our nose and all that) because they didn’t want their own destruction assured by ours?
RexDart- I’m sure those pinko commies thought the same thing about the US (evil imperialist, capitalist running dogs that we are). MAD wasn’t even around when the real villians (Stalin, Mao) were running the show in their countries.
Here’s a better idea, anyone can “Call Out” someone officially. The person getting “Called Out” gets to choose the “rules” of the duel, what weapon(s) and if it is to the death or not. The person getting “Called Out” can also decide to turn down the person doing the calling.
The duel is shown as a national TV Game Show, and if anyone turns down the duel, their name is displayed on the Show.
This sounds very familiar for some reason.
I guess you’ve never heard of Curtis LeMay? The first commander of Strategic Air Command, he lobbied very strongly to launch a first strike before the Soviets got a retaliatory ability, and there were a great many people in high places who agreed with him.
Think it was just limited to the 50s? Just look at the Cuban Missile Crisis. The only reason it was a “crisis” at all, is because of high-up loonies hovering over the button. The USSR didn’t pitch a fit, threatening to start the holocaust, when we stationed our comparable missiles in Turkey first. Yet when they merely respond in like kind, oh, suddenly that’s worth starting WW3 over.
Fortunately, cooler heads were in charge. Just as they were on the Soviet side of the fence. But to say the USA were the Good Guys, rah rah, we’d never do something like that, is rather rose-tinted. We were at least as much of a threat to the world (not to mention world peace, via state-sponsored “freedom fighters” and dictators) as the Soviets, if not more.
So if someone kills my friend, I can kill him with impunity, but I can’t jail him? Seems odd that “do not nothing” and “kill him” are the only responses allowed, with no intermediate options. I view the legal system as just another “chit” that people have. We tried killing people we didn’t like for a while, but decided that wasn’t the “civilized” way of handling it, so we moved on to inprisoning them. MAD was a recapitulation of that primitive strategy, chosen out of necessity rather than prefernce.
I view the Second Amendent as part of this idea. If people can kill with impunity, then we have anarchy. But if no one can kill except the government, then we’ve lost the most important check on the government. But it’s a huge leap from the right to bear arms to the right to bear arms without being held accountable for what you do while bearing them.
Except that the US got the Bomb first, so while we know that it wasn’t just Russia’s nuclear capability that kept the US from bombing them, we can only speculate on what Stalin would have done with a nuclear monopoly.
As for when MAD started, the basic idea has been around longer than nukes. After all, WWI destroyed both the Kaiser’s and the Tsar’s government.
Wars have been bringing down governments of both winners and losers since groups of cavemen were throwing rocks at each other. That has nothing to do with MAD wrt nation-states. MAD means killing a sizeable portion of the population and destroying enough infrastructure on both sides to leave no recognizable trace of either American or Soviet society.
This just wasn’t possible until well into the nuclear age. The “basic idea” just wasn’t conceivable before the nuclear age, and not possible until the age of ICBMs, metric assloads of bombers and early warning radar to give the target of the first strike a chance to send of his ICBMs and bombers.
On a more personal level, having to count on possibly flaky friends or family to carry out the retaliatory strike makes it more like MMDMJM- Maybe Mutual Destruction, Maybe Just Me. This already exists.
Scooby, how about the Punic Wars? Rome managed to pretty much destroy Carthage right down to the paving stones. Genocide…utter destruction of the losing side…occured frequently in ancient times. Nuclear weapons just make it go faster and easier.
And you’d know what a strobe light feels like. 
Enjoy,
Steven
Hmm…what’s to stop a person from killing another, then turning in that person’s Murder Chit?
It’d have to be changed so that each person could only turn in their own Chit. Theft of a Chit would be punishable by death.
Well, see, what we’ll do is create a group of Unified CitizeNs to oversee the operation of Murder Chits. Maybe some of the skeptics are right and we should limit the possession of the Chits. After all, MAD has clearly shown itself to work, there’s no need to beat it into the ground; I mean, the point has been made, no need to be smug about it. We should thus stop the proliferation of Murder Chits. I think that’s a good idea.
But, hey, MAD was a beaming success! My man lno knows what it’s all about. Let’s all pat ourselves on the back.
…what? Of course I get to keep my Murder Chit. How else am I to be sure that you won’t try and get one if I can’t wave it in your face?
Damn hypocrit! You assume that only you know how best to use a Chit! Well, there are a lot of other people out that that deserve the protection a Chit can bring. Just because they are too poor to own a Chit doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t have them! You’re only punishing the disadvantaged!
Look at you, prancing around with your bodyguards. I bet they have Chits too! But no, no one else can have a Chit, they would just hurt themselves or others with it, wouldn’t they?
I have no clue just what you’re trying to say. However, in the MAD scenario, the nukes are the only way to achieve that “Assured” destruction. Conventional attacks are highly risky, and will almost assuredly fall well short of the devestation that a nuclear strike would cause. You can cripple a large first-world nation in an hour with a nuke strike, but it could take weeks, months, even years to do it with conventional forces, assuming you’re even able to do it. The nukes are the “big threat” that overwhelm everything else. The “nuclear triad” (Ground-based missiles, sea-based missiles, and airborn bombers) nearly ensure that it is impossible to eliminate the entire nuclear arm even with a surprise attack.
With the Murder Chits, though, you don’t have that invincibility. You can easily eliminate someone’s Murder Chit ability; Walk up and shoot them in the head. Or blow them up. Or any of the thousands of ways people kill people already. Most likely, they won’t have any warning of it, and in any case, won’t know the name/number of the person killing them, nor have the time to call in and cash their chit in. If you use the Chit on someone who also has one, you’ve doomed yourself to a certain death. But you can still break into their house and shoot them dead, and you’ve still got the same chances of getting away as if those Murder Chits didn’t exist (And will likely live a good long time anyway).
MAD and Murder Chits aren’t the same scenario.
I can also see some major problems with those Murder Chits. Imagine some terrorist group that’s got a few dozen members inside the country as citizens. Imagine the disruption they could cause… “Hey look, they finally got a replacement president! snicker Watch this…” Fanatic groups would wield a dominating power…
That’s interesting, because I thought that was the problem with allowing the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Interesting that, though MAD and my Murder Chits are very different, we seem to be able to stop others from having them for the same reason, only MAD works and Murder Chits don’t.
MAD presupposes that states who had their act together enough to come up with a nuclear program of sufficient size to all but obliterate the urban areas of another nation also had a reasonably rational decision making process.
This is a bad assumption to make when devolved to the individual level.
Well, now that North Korea and Iraq have viable nuclear programs, maybe it’s a bad assumption to make altogether.
I think the basic analogy is flawed because there are were only two superpowers in the Cold War, and with these chit thingies you have eighteen million.
Let’s extrapolate the scenario. One ICBM can blow up a country. Each country has one ICBM. Let’s start with two countries:
USSR shoots, then US shoots, both die.
US shoots, USSR shoots, both die.
MAD in action. Ok, add a third (neutral) country.
USSR shoots at US, US shoots at USSR, both die, France wins.
US shoots at USSR, USSR shoots at US, both die, France wins.
The only way to win is not to play. Or to team up, and risk a 50% chance of dying.