Nuclear Age

Much of the intellectual debate about the U.S.-Soviet nuclear relationship was encapsulated in the perennial controversy about what became known as Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD). The concept of MAD was first enunciated in the early 1960s when both the United States and the Soviet Union began deploying large numbers of intercontinental-range ballistic missiles (ICBMs) armed with nuclear warheads. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and other U.S. officials at the time argued that, in a situation of MAD, any large-scale use of nuclear weapons by either side would provoke retaliation in kind by the other side, resulting in the effective destruction of both. Under this logic, no rational leader on either side could hope to gain a meaningful advantage by starting a nuclear war, and therefore mutual deterrence would prevail. Many observers construed these statements as an accurate reflection of U.S. nuclear doctrine.

The intellectual debate about MAD often was reflected in concerns raised in public discussions and policy circles. The notion that, as Winston Churchill put it, the "safety" of each side rested on the prospect of "mutual annihilation" was a discomfiting one for many Americans. The vulnerability inherent in MAD was in contrast to the relative invulnerability that the United States had always enjoyed by virtue of its geography. The desire to move beyond MAD and restore a sense of invulnerability lay behind periodic attempts to build defenses against ICBMs and submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) and to develop more credible nuclear war-fighting strategies. The Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) of President Ronald Reagan's administration, announced in 1983 as a program to develop a comprehensive system of protection against ICBMs and SLBMs, was explicitly justified on the ground that indefinite reliance on MAD was too perilous an option.

Critics of these attempts to move beyond MAD, including Keeny and Panofsky, focused on two basic points. First, they argued that MAD was not a mutable doctrine but was instead a codification of the underlying strategic and technical realities. In their view, MAD followed from the technical nature of nuclear missiles and the inherent vulnerability of urban populations to nuclear destruction. No plausible doctrinal or technological innovations could alter this reality. Second, they maintained that attempts to move beyond MAD were dangerous because they would create the illusion that MAD was a doctrine and could be changed. This misperception, they contended, would increase the risk of nuclear war. Keeny and Panofsky argued that if policymakers erroneously believed it was possible to fight and win a nuclear war without suffering "unacceptable damage," they might be more willing to risk the use of nuclear weapons.

Unease about MAD also led in a very different direction. From the start of the nuclear age, a relatively small but vocal group of critics insisted that the only acceptable course of action was to ban all nuclear weapons. This school of thought was especially prevalent among scientists and intellectuals associated with the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a specialized monthly publication that became famous for its doomsday clock on the cover. In later decades, many intellectuals supporting complete nuclear disarmament became active in banthe-bomb campaigns and the nuclear freeze movement. Jonathan Schell's best-selling The Fate of the Earth (1982), published at the height of the nuclear freeze movement in the early 1980s, laid out the case for the elimination of nuclear weapons. The book came under harsh criticism from many specialists on nuclear strategy and arms control, but it struck a chord with the U.S.. "peace" movement and with a considerable number of ordinary Americans who were concerned about the sharp increase in U.S.-Soviet tensions in the early 1980s. Not until the Cold War drew to an end in the late 1980s and early 1990s—and Washington and Moscow agreed to much sharper reductions in their strategic nuclear arsenals—did the antinuclear weapons movement wane in influence.