Both the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT) and Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) treaties all reflected attempts by the superpowers to manage strategic nuclear developments in such a way as to stabilize mutual deterrence. Ballistic missile defenses were outlawed; "first strike" weapons were decommissioned; civil defense was discouraged. However, neither the U.S. nor the Soviet Union was comfortable basing their country's defense on deterrence. a b Castella, Tom de (2012-02-15). "How did we forget about mutually assured destruction?". BBC News . Retrieved 2017-09-19. Keir A. Lieber and Daryl G. Press "The Rise of U.S. Nuclear Primacy," Foreign Affairs, March/April 2006, pp 42–55.

a b Jervis, Robert (2021), Bartel, Fritz; Monteiro, Nuno P. (eds.), "The Nuclear Age", Before and After the Fall: World Politics and the End of the Cold War, Cambridge University Press, pp.115–131, doi: 10.1017/9781108910194.008, ISBN 978-1-108-90677-7, S2CID 244858515 This comes up as part of the Arcade ending for The Terminator in Mortal Kombat 11. While attempting to use the Hourglass to find a future where Skynet wins the Robot War, it discovers that in any timeline where the war starts, both humans and machines are rendered extinct at the end. Since its programming was to find the best possible outcome for Skynet, not to win the war, the Terminator instead sets the future as one where the two sides live in peace, erasing the war entirely. Strategic Air Command Declassifies Nuclear Target List from 1950s". nsarchive.gwu.edu . Retrieved 2016-01-06.Find sources: "Mutual assured destruction"– news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR ( March 2008) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message) To go after cities, if deterrence should fail, to my mind would be suicidal. It wasn’t just a question of damage-limiting; I believed—and still do—that a counterforce doctrine and posture of sufficient scope would persuade the Soviet Union that it could not count on achieving a military victory in a nuclear exchange. This would assure effective deterrence.

To some maintaining the Cold War’s mindset of matching capability to deter war, this may seem like an egregious failure on the part of America’s defense infrastructure. After all, how do you hope to deter a 100 megaton weapon if your own most powerful weapons are tiny by comparison? Well, the truth is, you simply don’t have to. Onboard this submersible drone is an absolutely massive warhead–with some claims saying it carries the same nuclear yield as the RS-28, and others claiming twice that. According to some Russian officials, the Status-6 can be equipped with a 100 megaton weapon… which is two times more powerful than the largest nuclear weapon ever even tested. A South Korean TV news bulletin shows North Korean leader Kim Jong Un after his country conducted a nuclear test in 2016. Credit: Getty Images However, there is some evidence that mutually assured destruction doesn’t actually work. Although no nuclear war has killed off humanity to this day, there have been a lot of close calls. The Cuban missile crisis brought us close to a nuclear holocaust. After the U.S. found out that the Soviet Union installed nuclear-armed missiles in Cuba, close to U.S. soil, the U.S. claimed it was ready to use military force to neutralize this threat if necessary. 9 If the U.S. had acted, we might not be here today. In this scenario, it may seem like the rational choice is to testify because assuming your accomplice does not testify, this choice leaves you with the least amount of jail time (one year). Plus, if you do not testify, you risk unfairly going to jail for much longer than your accomplice. If each individual does testify, however, they will end up with two years’ jail time each (more than the minimum). However, in an ideal scenario, if both criminals here realize that there is mutually assured destruction, they will both do nothing, resulting in only one year of jail time each. The dilemma provides evidence for the equilibrium strategy, as the best move is no move – but it is dependent on a high degree of trust between both parties that the other side will cooperate. When MAD Doesn’t Work: Mutually Assured Distrust

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The Status-6 Oceanic Multipurpose System has gone by a number of names in Western analysis over the years, in part because this weapon was considered something of an urban legend for a long time. Rumors about the Status-6 first bubbled to the surface years ago, largely through vague mentions in Russian news reports, but its existence was confirmed within the past few years–first in a leaked image of a Pentagon intelligence report, and then through official announcements from the Kremlin. The USS George Washington (SSBN-598), the lead ship of the US Navy's first class of Fleet Ballistic Missile Submarines, Nuclear (SSBN) Other countries have beefed up their military might and are in a modern-day arms race or poised to enter one, including India and Pakistan, North Korea and South Korea, and Iran and China. Sources For a time after World War II, America held the upper hand with regards to nuclear superiority. It used this threat of "massive retaliation" as a means to deter Soviet aggression. By the late 1950s, the Soviet Union had built up a convincing nuclear arsenal that could be delivered on the territory of the United States and Western Europe. Somewhere within the nuclear arms race, nations seemed to forget one fundamental truth: we are all human and we are all in this together. If one country dropped a nuclear bomb, others would retaliate, and before long, all of humanity would perish. 1 This is where nuclear deterrence was developed – since both the Soviet Union and the U.S. had nuclear bombs, they dissuaded one another from using them with the threat of retaliation. One nuclear bomb would become a catalyst for dozens more and no nation would emerge victorious – in other words, a lose-lose situation. 4

Toning Up the Nuclear Triad". Time. 1985-09-23. Archived from the original on March 7, 2008 . Retrieved 2010-10-08. But the threat of nuclear annihilation remains real. The Federation of American Scientists, a nonprofit founded in 1945 by scientists and engineers who had worked on the Manhattan Project to develop the first nuclear bomb, reports that as of early 2022, about 12,700 nuclear warheads are possessed today by nine countries: the United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, France, China, India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea. Most of them are held by the United States and Russia, which have about 4,000 warheads each. And according to a 2018 scientific study in the journal Safety, that's enough to wipe out almost all of us. Goodreads. (n.d.). Mutually Assured Destruction Quotes. Retrieved February 27, 2021, from https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/tag/mutually-assured-destruction Twilight Struggle, being a game about the Cold War, uses the threat of this as a Non-Standard Game Over. If the DEFCON scale reaches 1, then the player responsible for playing the card that started the sequence loses immediately. a b Richard Pipes (1977). "Why the Soviet Union Thinks It Could Fight and Win a Nuclear War" (PDF). Reed College. Archived from the original (PDF) on December 14, 2013 . Retrieved September 4, 2013.Other treaties such as the START 1 treaty in 1991 and the New START treaty in 2011 aimed to further reduce both nations’ ballistic weapons capabilities. Brendan Rittenhouse Green, The Revolution that Failed: Nuclear Competition, Arms Control, and the Cold War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020) The atomic bombs that the US unleashed in World War II work through a chain reaction known as nuclear fission – by splitting the atom of isotopes such as uranium and plutonium. During the Cold War, America and Russia made hydrogen bombs thousands of times more powerful than those dropped on Japan using a process known as nuclear fusion which works in reverse – binding together nuclei – in the same way the sun produces energy. (Oppenheimer’s opposition to the development of more powerful bombs later cost him his job.) Modern nuclear bombs use both fission and fusion.