The World's Gone MAD
Debunking the "Mutually Assured Destruction" Argument for Nuclear Weapons
"Those who like peace should love nuclear weapons. They are the only weapons ever invented that work decisively against their own use. Those who advocate a zero option [as in zero nuclear weapons] argue in effect that we should eliminate the cause of the extensive peace the nuclear world has enjoyed." - Kenneth Waltz, war veteran and professor of political science1
Dr. Waltz here has articulated the MAD (mutually assured destruction) argument for nuclear weapons, one which has been used since the Cold War. It can be restated as follows: If you launch a nuclear weapon at someone who also has a nuclear weapon, then they are guaranteed to launch one back at you which means that you will be totally annihilated as well. Therefore, no one would ever launch a nuclear weapon in the first place. Furthermore, any significant military action against a nuclear-armed state is unlikely because of the threat of nuclear retaliation.
Far from being a fringe viewpoint, the MAD argument is a popular defense of nuclear weapons. The quote at the top of this article comes from a man who wrote the standard textbook on international relations.2 The dean of my graduate school physics program once argued it to me. My most recent encounter with MAD was in an issue of Foreign Affairs I picked up two weeks ago, quoted here: "Given the threat of nuclear war, the risk of escalation in a military confrontation between major powers is simply too great. That risk has been sufficient to limit the incidence and extent of such direct confrontations"3.
Have nuclear weapons in fact led to a more a peaceful world? Well, there are many factors responsible for the level of violence in the world and, lacking an alternate Earth to compare ours to, it is impossible to prove it either way, but other approaches to the question are still available to us, namely
to interrogate the logic of MAD to see if it is in fact sound &
to consult intuition on the matter
These two approaches will form the following two sections of the essay, after which I will conclude with a third section envisioning a different path for society. My intention for this essay is that it will empower peace activists to push back when they encounter the MAD argument in the wild.
Interrogating the logic of MAD
There are at least five flaws to the MAD argument…
Countries without nuclear weapons cannot strike back, thus breaking the "mutual" part of the MAD logic. If this were the only flaw with the MAD argument, it would still mean that more than half the world's population is fair game for nuclear annihilation.4 That is not world peace.
The perpetrator of the initial strike may not be clear. What if the weapon were launched from a submarine? Who would you fire back at? Or, worse, what if the weapon were launched from a foreign military base and you accidentally fired back at the wrong country?
A false alarm could accidentally lead to a retaliatory strike. Our world narrowly avoided this scenario in 1983 when Soviet early-warning systems falsely detected incoming nuclear missiles,5 a false alarm which would have been reported up the chain of command but for the actions of a man named Stanislov Petrov, who, though tasked with reporting any sign of nuclear strike, chose to instead ignore the alarm because of “a funny feeling in [his] gut”,6 thus committing a breach of duty akin to treason. What would have happened if Mr. Petrov has simply followed his orders and reported an incoming nuclear attack? Would the Soviets have bombed the United States? We cannot say for certain, but prevention of nuclear holocaust should not depend on there being a particularly courageous person in the right place at the right time.
A retaliatory strike may not be guaranteed. The logic of MAD only works if the mutual destruction is assured, but the Stanislov Petrov story proves retaliation is not, in fact, assured. On that fateful day in 1983, the Soviets had good reason to believe that there indeed were incoming nuclear missiles, but they did not retaliate.
If the initial strike comes from a decentralized, stateless power, there is no clear target for retaliation. If ISIL launched a nuclear weapon at you, where would you direct the retaliatory strike?
Here are two more problems with nuclear weapons that the MAD argument does not address…
Our engineering systems are fallible. Who's to say we won't detonate one of these weapons by accident? All our other technologies have failure modes: internet service goes out, public transit systems break down, oil pipelines leak, nuclear power facilities explode, etc. There is no guarantee this won't also happen with nuclear weapons.
Our social systems are fallible. Right now there are 13,0007 nuclear warheads in the world, distributed across nine countries. It takes enormous faith in the continuous soundness of all nine of these countries' political systems to think that never, even for just one moment, will some madman gain unilateral power and launch a nuclear weapon.
As a shield against nuclear war, the logic of MAD is about as strong as a wet napkin.
Consulting intuition on the matter
Speaking personally, the MAD argument feels to me like a particularly modern insanity. It boggles my mind to think that right now there are engineers at Northrop Grumman working to build another 400 nuclear missiles8, each capable of eviscerating a metropolis; that anybody could look at this and say with a sigh of relief, "Ah I feel much safer now,” is astounding to me. People make arguments for nuclear weapons in their head, but I doubt anyone feels good about it in their body.
We all live with the hidden anxiety that at any moment we could be obliterated. Our world is filled with pistols with which someone could kill one person in a moment, assault rifles with which someone could kill 10 people in a moment, and nuclear weapons with which someone could kill 100,000 people in a moment.9 This anxiety has settled into our psyches and has become invisible to us because it is present at every moment in our lives, no matter where on Earth we are.
This psychological condition is not conducive to a peaceful world. Not only does it disturb the peace of us as individuals, it also makes it more difficult to solve our global problems: with our society seemingly hurtling faster and faster toward ecological ruin, what we need right now more than anything is to practice pausing, breathing, and opening ourselves up for vision of a way out of this mess, a practice which is hampered by the feeling of there always being a gun to our heads. Furthermore, once we do have some vision, we will need to cooperate in good faith as a global species in order to achieve it, a process made terribly difficult by nuclear weapons which tend to squash feelings of good will between nations, complicating all attempts at diplomacy.
Visions of the future
Let us imagine a world where laborers, scientists, and politicians across the world blow the trumpet of nuclear disarmament, where we stop, look at each other and sigh, and see that none of us want this anymore, to be under threat of nuclear extinction. The patient work of disarming the arsenals then begins. The United States disarms 50 of its weapons as a peace offering in good faith, the opposite of a first strike, promising that if other countries follow suit, it will disarm 50 more. The scientists who previously were building those weapons are instead employed to disarm them and in so doing feel a tension inside themselves release, finding a joy that they forgot they had lost. As the tight, anxious knot of nuclear threat we had all been holding in our chests unravels, so do other knots in our world and psyche. The peace that comes from disarmament spills over into other realms and we wonder, wait, why is there still an embargo on Cuba? Why are we still demanding debt payments from Madagascar? Why do we have a military base in Kenya? Why does one man have 3 billion dollars while 3 billion people have one dollar? Why are our animals kept in factories? What was that dream I had last night...
Another way feels possible.
From the article “What Money Can’t Buy” by Barry Eichengreen, pg. 66 of the July/August 2022 issue of Foreign Affairs, Volume 101, Number 4
There are nine nuclear armed states: China, France, India, Israel, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States. Their cumulative population is about 3.6 billion, less than half of the global population of 7.8 billion.