Invasion Z: Russia's Onslaught, Ukraine's Heroic Resistance, and the Brink of World War III by Belcher Jason

Author:Belcher, Jason
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2022-05-29T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 10 Is it Still a MAD World?

European attitudes towards Russia have sharpened, with even Finland and Sweden both recently signaling a new interest in becoming part of NATO. In response, Russia threatened to place nuclear weapons in the Baltics, bringing the shadow of nuclear war closer to Europe. But this was not the first time Russia used the threat of nuclear war to further its own agenda. Only two weeks after the invasion of Ukraine, Putin gave a conference in which he “reminded” the world that Russia was a major nuclear power. Putin has used veiled nuclear threats as a way of shielding his conventional forces from attack, an approach which flipped previous paradigms of nuclear strategy on its head. Where once nuclear weapons were considered a trump card to conventional armies, now nukes are being used to protect Russian conventional forces in the field. The return of the specter of nuclear war raises a crucial question: do we still live in a MAD world?

During the Cold War years of about 1955 through 1991, the concept of mutually assured destruction became known by the acronym MAD. The idea was that since American and Soviet nuclear arsenals were large enough to destroy the other, nobody would ever use nuclear weapons first, because doing so would guarantee their own destruction. In a perverse way, the MAD paradigm prevented the actual use of nuclear weapons, while simultaneously spurring an increase in size of atomic arsenals. While initiating a nuclear attack came to be considered suicidal by both American and Soviet military planners, at the same time, expanding the number of available nuclear weapons came to be seen as necessary to prevent either side from gaining an advantage large enough to make them think MAD might no longer apply. Consequently thousands of nuclear weapons were built and pointed at each other by the U.S. and Soviet Union. As insane as the MAD construct was, it worked in the sense that neither the U.S. nor the Soviet Union ever launched a nuclear attack on the other.

Determining whether or not the rules of MAD still apply in 2022 is a difficult task because the world has changed in important ways since 1991, and we need to understand the impact of those alterations. For example, today stealth aircraft are capable of launching undetectable surprise attacks while carrying nuclear payloads. Non-stealth platforms, including both aircraft and missiles, were visible on radar, which both Soviet and American military forces possessed. If one side launched an attack, the other side would know it almost immediately. When the scopes were all clear, everyone could breathe at least a temporary sigh of relief, which added an element of stability to the situation. A crucial part of MAD was the ability to instantly detect an incoming attack. Today the U.S. has stealth aircraft which cannot be seen by radar or satellites, and which can deploy nuclear weapons. Russia may or may not have a similar capability, but the fact that even one side possess proven stealth platforms changes the game compared to the original Cold War.

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