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It is a clue to the eventual demise of mutual assured destruction (MAD) that the term was coined by a critic who sought to highlight how ludicrous the concept was. In the 1960s, Donald Brennan-an analyst at the conservative Hudson institute, who was making the case for ballistic missile defense-used the acronym MAD to ridicule the idea that in a nuclear war, or even a large conventional conflict, each side should be prepared to destroy the other's cities and society. Of course, this objective was not sensible, but MAD proponents argued that wa.s the point: The outcome would be so dreadful that both sides would be deterred from starting a nuclear war or even taking actions that might k-ad to it.
Throughout much of the Cold War, U.S. declaratory policy (i.e., what policymakers said in public) closely approximated MAD. The view, most clearly articulated by then Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, was that there was little utility in adding strategic weapons above those needed for MAD, that nuclear superiority was meaningless, that defense was useless, and that this bizarre configuration was in everyone's interest. Indeed, the implication was that the United States should not only avoid menacing the Soviets' retaliatory capability but also help the Soviets make their weapons invulnerable-an idea that intrigued McNamara.
Critics like military strategists Herman Kahn and Colin Gray disagreed. They argued, that nuclear warheads were immensely destructive but not qualitatively different from previous weapons of warfare. Consequently, the traditional rules of strategy applied: Security policy could only rest on credible threats (i.e., those that it made sense to carry out). The adoption of a policy that involved throwing up your hands and destroying the world if war actually broke out was not only the height of irresponsibility; MAD also failed to address the main strategic concern for the United States, which was to prevent the Soviets from invading Western Europe. The stability that MAD was supposed to provide actually would have allowed U.S. adversaries to use force below the nuclear level whenever it was to their advantage to do so. If the United States could not have threatened to escalate a conflict by using nuclear weapons, then the Soviets would have had free rein to fight and win a conventional...