Mutual assured destruction

Assembled from 24 blocks · 2 evidence · 11 related

1. Story
2. The condition — not, originally, the policy — in which each of two nuclear powers retains enough forces after absorbing the other's best first strike to destroy the attacker in return. Once that is true on both sides, striking first buys nothing: the attacker still dies, so the ordinary military logic of surprise stops working. The phrase grew out of the "assured destruction" criterion Robert McNamara used inside the US Defense Department in the mid-1960s as a budgeting yardstick — a stated fraction of Soviet population and industrial capacity that US forces had to be able to destroy in retaliation, whatever happened first — and the acronym MAD was coined by the Hudson Institute analyst Donald Brennan as a criticism rather than a description. Two things about it are routinely misunderstood. First, it is a statement about survivability, not about numbers: what stabilises the relationship is that the retaliatory force cannot be found and killed, which is why submarines and hardened silos matter more than yields. Second, it was never the whole of American war planning. The actual target lists remained substantially counterforce — aimed at the other side's military and nuclear forces — through NSDM-242 in 1974 and PD-59 in 1980, so the declaratory doctrine and the operational plan diverged for most of the period.
3. Knowledge
4. Mutual assured destruction
5. Second-strike survivability
6. The intercontinental ballistic missile
7. Connections
8. The intercontinental ballistic missile
9. Second-strike survivability
10. The Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty
11. SALT I and the ABM Treaty are signed in Moscow
12. Reagan announces the Strategic Defense Initiative
13. Mutual assured destruction
14. Second-strike survivability
15. The R-7 Semyorka
16. The R-7 completes a successful full-range flight
17. Sputnik 1 is launched
18. Mutual assured destruction
19. The intercontinental ballistic missile
20. The ballistic-missile submarine
21. START I is signed in Moscow
22. Evidence
23. Named as the general narrative authority behind this pack's framing of the period, and cited in the Journey's own declared references. V55 verification basis: NOT consulted in this session. It is also a work with a definite interpretive position — broadly, that Soviet conduct drove the confrontation and that Western pressure and Soviet internal failure ended it — and this pack cites it as one reading rather than as a neutral summary.
24. Named as the canonical open published series for warhead inventories and force structure across the period and after it. V55 verification basis: NOT consulted; no warhead total, peak-stockpile figure or year of peak is quoted anywhere in this pack, and a curator should take every such number from this series directly.