Richard Rhodes in his two-volume work on A-Bomb and H-Bomb development talks a lot about MAD and how it led to rational but awful thinking. In the absence of better choices, the planners did what they thought was best, but both sides came to realise the only suitable posture was to be capable of retaliation and make sure the other side knew it, but also to minimise belief there was specific hostile intent.
Politicians didn't like it. the US never renounced first strike.
I still struggle with how "hard" a hardened C&C jet can be, and I think there is a general principle, that the EMP pulse you can defend against is not as big as the one the enemy can produce.
I read that defector provided soviet jets at one point had tiny weeny valves, which were not indications of how backward their electrical engineering was: they were capable of being rad-hardened more than the IC's of the time. I'm not sure this is true.
For US readers, a "valve" (in the context of electrionics) is known as a vacuum tube on this side of the pond. It's called "valve" in British english because it controls electricity like a valve does water.
> I read that defector provided soviet jets at one point had tiny weeny valves, which were not indications of how backward their electrical engineering was: they were capable of being rad-hardened more than the IC's of the time. I'm not sure this is true.
Viktor Belenko's defection to Japan w/ a MiG-25 is a fascinating story unto itself. But, yes, the MiG-25 had vacuum tubes and other design elements that seemed like anachronisms @ first glance.
> The use of vacuum tubes also made the aircraft's systems resistant to an electromagnetic pulse, for example after a nuclear blast. They were also presumably used to provide radiation hardening for the avionics.
Whenever Vacuum tubes and Soviet Era aircraft are brought up it's stated they used vacuum tubes because they lacked the capabilities to make semiconductors. I am sure it helped with rad-hardening but it was not the reason they chose the tech.
There's an episode of the (excellent) podcast Hardcore History by Dan Carlin that explores the topic of MAD and articulates it extremely well (IMHO). The episode is called the Destroyer of Worlds [1].
I have heard what seemed like a rational justification for first strike.
For MAD to be effective you need to convince people you’re both able and willing to vindictively kill off large swaths of the worlds population. As such you do want to come off as just slightly unhinged which having first strike capability projects.
The main reason for US/NATO not to renounce first strike was because it would be fairly easily overwhelmed by Warsaw Pact forces if WP attacked conventionally. Probably some kind of large WP exercise turned real very quickly combined with Spetsnaz causing havoc behind NATO lines.
First strike was needed in order to slow things down and do some damage, in theory to a) give the US time to rush conventional forces to Europe, b) bloody the nose of WP enough to make them think twice and c) destroy as much as possible of the WP rear areas and reinforcements. If the WP had gone through the Fulda Gap or the South option near Switzerland -tactical nuclear mines, Special Operations nuclear devices, tactical nuclear artillery, tactical aircraft attacks etc would have been used pretty quickly on them.
In reality it probably would have escalated to far worse than that pretty quickly I'm guessing.
It remembers me of a fictional documentary like 20 ago in German TV covering the third world war. The premise was a military coup in Russia. Back then, Jelzin just squashed the coup attempt against Gorbatshev. The development was very cold war like, focused on Germany and ended with a full scale nuclear war. Quite chilling. Only criticism I would have is that the Russians were the bad guys, so.
Edit 2: It is set before the fall of the USSR and the German reunification, classic cold war stuff. Just watching it. Forgot the details, but damn the fall of the iron curtan could really have ended differently. Basically, Gorbatshev was forced to step down and military hawks took over.
Only skimmed the timeline quickly of the video quickly (ticker headlines gave a good indication of events) and the script seems to roughly follow modernized equivalent events of the first hour of the movie The Day After from 1983. (a worthy watch but not really for enjoyment) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iyy9n8r16hs
Do yourself a favour and never watch the BBC Movie from the 80s called Threads about a nuclear war breaking out. Incredible movie but by far the most depressing thing I've ever watched. I felt down for days after watching it during college one time. Never been so effected by a movie. Quite a remarkable piece of work.
Another is Countdown to Looking Glass. It starts out as being told through live news reports although I guess the writers couldn't find a way to maintain that type of storytelling through the whole movie.
Although it's not nuclear war, a better example in the same vein is Special Bulletin.
Another story I can't validate, is that most of the EEC (at the time) agreed that if there was any attempt by NATO forces to arm and deploy the bombs held inside the european territory and they hadn't agreed, they'd seize them.
Basically, first-strike was a posture in public. The real question was "who commanded it"
Conversely in the early days of NATO, the US nuclear command and control was aggressively re-engineered when it was realized that a 24 year old private on a European airbase with the keys to the arming mechanisms for the on-site nuclear bombs wasn't actually going to deter a European battlefield commander who believed he needed to use them right now.
Daniel Ellsberg was rather alarmed to find that Eisenhower had secretly delegated nuclear release capability to regional commanders who had then delegated authority to fairly low level commanders. This delegation wasn't removed when Kennedy became president.
Rhodes writes about earlier concern whose finger was on what button, iirc when Macarthur panicked about the Korean war and requested local tactical command.
Which is kind of an oral history of the development of the current command and control systems (includes some great notes on things like "how unlikely the air force thought a mid-air collision of nuclear armed bombers was" - the spoiler is surprisingly more likely then it was thought after the second one happened).
"Deterrence is the art of producing, in the mind of the enemy, the fear to attack. [...] The whole point of a doomsday machine is lost if you keep it a secret." ~~ Dr. Strangelove
Its forgotten now but during the Cold War there were lengthy discussions in Europe and the USSR about just how willing the US would be to go to WW3 over Paris or Berlin.
Both the French and the English decided to maintain their own nuclear deterrent for this reason.
Politicians didn't like it. the US never renounced first strike.
I still struggle with how "hard" a hardened C&C jet can be, and I think there is a general principle, that the EMP pulse you can defend against is not as big as the one the enemy can produce.
I read that defector provided soviet jets at one point had tiny weeny valves, which were not indications of how backward their electrical engineering was: they were capable of being rad-hardened more than the IC's of the time. I'm not sure this is true.