Mutually Assured Destruction

The term mutually assured destruction (MAD) was used starting in the mid-1960s by American policy makers and strategists to describe a situation in which the United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) each possessed the capacity to retaliate with a devastating nuclear attack on the other, even in circumstances in which the retaliator had been struck first in a surprise nuclear attack. The term denoted a form of strategic stability in which neither side would initiate a nuclear attack for fear of retribution. The barely imaginable power of nuclear weapons was stalemated by mutual capability. The concept guided how some American decision [Page 432]makers saw the relationship between technology and strategy and in particular how ostensibly defensive measures, such as antiballistic missiles (ABMs), were thought to weaken stability. The idea of assured destruction became associated with Robert McNamara, the highly influential secretary of defense in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. The acronym for Mutually Assured Destruction—MAD—became a focus for critics of McNamara's policies on both the Left and Right. Opponents of nuclear weapons, including those in Europe, took the acronym as an indicator of the insanity of nuclear war.

The “father of the atomic bomb,” Robert Oppenheimer, had previously likened the two superpowers to two scorpions in a bottle, each capable of killing the other but only at risk to its own life. Yet, for a decade or more after the Soviets first tested their atomic bomb in 1949, the United States possessed overwhelming numerical superiority in nuclear weaponry over the Soviet Union. Indeed, until the early 1960s, the United States might well have been able to wreak devastation on the USSR without suffering direct retaliation. With the development of long-range intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), however, the Soviet ability to attack the United States was increasingly apparent.

The term assured destruction was first used in 1963, and reflected a change in American thinking about nuclear strategy. McNamara had previously sought to design an American nuclear strategy that would provide incentives for the Soviet Union to withhold attacks on American cities even if the United States had struck the USSR first (as existing American and NATO strategy envisaged). This would be done by avoiding attacks on Soviet cities at the outset of war, but then threatening such destruction to deter attacks on American cities. McNamara articulated this counterforce strategy to NATO in May 1962 and then publicly in June 1962, when it became known as the no-cities approach. The development of a strategy based on assured destruction therefore reflected a significant shift from McNamara's earlier approach.

The essence of assured destruction was that retaliation would be inexorable and destruction would be sufficiently devastating to act as a deterrent. Quantifying what level of damage was unacceptable to the Soviet leadership led American strategists and policy planners to quantify the level of devastation. Initially, it was suggested that assured destruction would involve the destruction of 50% of Soviet industry and 30% of the Soviet population. This would be delivered by U.S. nuclear attacks amounting to the equivalent of 400 million tons (or 400 megatons) of TNT. Yet, when it came to discerning what was unacceptable to an American leader, McNamara, as well as other senior officials of the Kennedy administration, believed that a U.S. president would be deterred from using nuclear weapons against the USSR by the loss of only a handful of U.S. cities.

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