Mutually Assured Destruction

The other night, being incredibly bored, I was flipping through the myriad channels that my sattelite company offers when I came across a program on the Military Channel. They were discussing the Cold War between the US and the Soviet Union. Most of it dealt with how both nations fought this war primarily through intermediaries, such as Cuba and Viet Nam, but there was one really interesting part about what was, and is, known as MAD - Mutually Assured Destruction.

MAD was both a good and bad thing. Good in that it prevented World War III on many occassions and bad in that the world lived under the specter of a nuclear holocaust. MAD was the presumption that if one nation launched nuclear weapons, the other would retaliate in kind, setting off a global nuclear war that neither would survive.

New intelligence paints a slightly different picture. It seems that the majority of the Soviet missiles were aimed at US allies in Europe, while nearly all of the US missiles were aimed at the heart of the USSR: Moscow, Leningrad, Stalingrad, etc. So while the US would have remained fairly untouched, the Soviet Union would have sustained massive damage.

So, in retrospect, it seems Mutually Assured Destruction was not quite mutual, nor was it assured.