A Cold War Satellite Program Called Parcae Revolutionized Signals Intelligence

At the height of the cold war, something like 1/3 of all SAC bombers were airborne at any time. They rotated a la shift changes to ensure there was no delay and minimized risk of not getting some off the ground. The fact there were not more Broken Arrow incidents is pretty amazing

> The cornerstone of our strategic policy continues to be to deter nuclear attack upon the United States or its allies. We do this by maintaining a highly reliable ability to inflict unacceptable damage upon any single aggressor or combination of aggressors at any time during the course of a strategic nuclear exchange, even after absorbing a surprise first strike. This can be defined as our assured-destruction capability.

> Security depends upon assuming a worst plausible case, and having the ability to cope with it. In that eventuality we must be able to absorb the total weight of nuclear attack on our country -- on our retaliatory forces, on our command and control apparatus, on our industrial capacity, on our cities, and on our population -- and still be capable of damaging the aggressor to the point that his society would be simply no longer viable in twentieth-century terms. That is what deterrence of nuclear aggression means. It means the certainty of suicide to the aggressor, not merely to his military forces, but to his society as a whole.

https://www.atomicarchive.com/resources/documents/deterrence...

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McNamara used the term "assured destruction" over and over again it became a cornerstone of his policy. Later a civilian added an "M" to MAD, and the term caught on.

Here's an interview transcript from much later, in 1987:

INT: Much has been made during this period of the term 'MAD', Mutually Assured or..

RM: Yes..

INT: ......Destruction. Can you explain what was meant by that?

RM: It's not mad! (laugh) Mutual Assured Destruction is the foundation of deterrence.

RM: Today it's a derogative term , but those that denigrate it don't understand deterrence. If you want a stable nuclear world -- if that isn't an oxymoron -- , to rephrase it, to the degree one can achieve a stable nuclear world, it requires that each side be confident that it can deter the other.

The type of imbalance I responded to was characterized as a "tilt". Overly simplistic models of MAD have a tendency to become completely divorced from reality. There was imbalance, real and perceived, in one direction or another, throughout the Cold War and right up to today, but so far nuclear war hasn't started despite what those simplistic models say. For one, those models overestimated the willingness of politicians on either side to commit mass murder simply because they have an opportunity. Secondly, they overestimate the tolerance for even the risk of just a single counter-value retaliatory strike managing to get through. The retaliation does not have to be total, the destruction not mutually balanced, for the threat of retaliation to still serve as effective deterrence.

The consequences of this were very nearly catastrophic, as the speed at which communication occurred was just so slow, with intel and news coming in so very very slowly. Discussions were being made in the dark and were outdated or based on outdated incorrect assumption.

I think there was considerably more luck than we’d like in the ‘system’ we engineered.

If you assume that folks don't want to murder millions of other humans just on general principle (without giving evidence, I think this is true), then there is the position C:

"regardless of the balance of destructive power, people try to avoid mass murder and maintain relationships through politics".

I have two suspicions:

First, the folks running the US (given thier history of slavery and genocide) often do not see other groups of humans as "human", and thus would make the calculation you're making. SO I can totally see why you'd assume US leaders think that way.

I also suspect that a core tenant of US propaganda is to assert that every country on earth would enslave every human. And thus the US is just following its manifest destiny in attempting to do so, via economic, political, or military means.

Those are just suspicions.

However, I think looking at things such as the Cuban Missile Crisis, US incursions into Korea in the 50s, the actual treatment by the USSR/Stalin of Vietnam and other national movements, and the split between the USSR and China-- looking at those things, I've had a hard time buying the "international communist conspiracy", especially when put up against what the US actually did to destabilize places like Guatamala, Iran, Indonesia, Brazil, Vietnam, etc.

That is to say, I think the folks running the USSR and China during the so-called cold war were actually focused on trying to unfuckup the dumb things that they did in transitioning their agriculture- I just don't buy (looking at how these countries dealt with each other) that they had the same willingness to murder half the planet by burning them to a crisp.