Mutual assured destruction

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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.

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