Why More MAD But No MAS?

Raymond F. Smith

Nuclear Deterence, United States

Our nuclear security concepts are trapped in an outmoded and dangerous time warp

Dan Goure is correct that we should have a more serious strategic defense system but his approach is on the one hand too modest and on the other potentially destabilizing.  Our nuclear security concepts are trapped in an outmoded and dangerous time warp.  Essentially, we continue to believe, as Winston Churchill told the British House of Commons in 1955, that “by a process of sublime irony (we) have reached a state…where safety will be the sturdy child of terror, and survival the twin brother of annihilation“.  This belief has roots in both the emotional trauma of the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor and the pitiless rationality of deterrence theory.  A nuclear Pearl Harbor would destroy the United States and needed to be avoided at all costs.  But there was no defense against nuclear missiles.  We were forced, therefore, to elaborate a strategy that ensured there would be no nuclear Pearl Harbor by convincing any potential adversaries (first and foremost, the Soviet Union) that we would be able to destroy them even if they attacked us first.  This strategy, which became known as Mutually Assured Destruction, or MAD, provided the intellectual framework for our strategic weapons programs throughout the Cold War.  It continues to do so today, twenty-five years after the end of the Cold War.