Full Description:
A doctrine of military strategy which posits that a full-scale use of nuclear weapons by two opposing sides would cause the complete annihilation of both the attacker and the defender. It is a suicide pact that ostensibly prevents war through the promise of total extinction. Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) is the grim logic that governed the Cold War. It relies on “second strike capability”—the ability of a nation to absorb a nuclear attack and still possess enough surviving weapons to destroy the attacker in return. This equilibrium of terror theoretically creates stability, as no rational actor would start a war they cannot survive.

Critical Perspective:
Critically, MAD represents the ultimate triumph of instrumental rationality over human ethics. It holds the entire civilian population of the planet hostage to the calculations of military planners. It normalized the concept of “megadeath” and required a permanent state of high-alert anxiety, where a single technical glitch or misunderstanding could result in the end of human civilization.

Further Reading:

• The Foundational Fears: Sputnik, the “Missile Gap,” and the Crisis of American Techno-Confidence

• The Engineers of the Abyss: Operation Paperclip, Soviet Recruitments, and the Foundational Moral Contradictions of the Space Race
•  The “Right Stuff” vs. The “Party Line”: The Clash of Technopolitical Cultures in the Space Race
• The Grey Zenith: The N1 Rocket and the Secret Soviet Moon Race
• The Wages of Apollo: Labor, Civil Rights, and the Unseen Workforce of the Moon Landing.
•  American Moonshot, American Fault Lines: The Space Program as a Mirror of Social Conflict.
• The Orbital Battle for the Third World: Space Diplomacy and Non-Aligned Alignments.
• “We came in peace for all mankind?”: Dissent, Diplomacy, and the Global Perceptions of the Space Race.