Like I had said, “(MAD) was purely for public consumption and to assuage the consciences of liberal intellectuals” (such as Bertrand Russell).
My “military geek” informant as much as told me that after the U.S. lost its atomic and then hydrogen bomb monopolies, the strategy became one of maintaining not arms parity by overwhelming superiority, and tremendous resources were spent by a wealthy nation to maintain that advantage over a rather poor nation.
If I were to add yet another data point, when German student Mathias Rust piloted a Cessna and landed in Red Square, Emmett Tyrrell of the American Spectator wrote somewhat in jest that “The Russians in response ‘pressed the button’ on their launch-on-warning-of-an-attack retaliatory response and it all came up a fizzle” or some words to that effect. Now you could say that the Russian air defense (Protivo Vozdushnaya Oborona Strany) refrained from shooting down a lone Cessna, obviously engaged in a stunt instead of a coordinated strike, out of humanitarian considerations. More likely the small, slow plane “flew in under the radar.” I understand the response involved the firings of some high-ranking AD (I mean PVO Strany) generals.
This is not to say that “pressing the button” would be a casual decision for an American President. But there is good reason to believe that any nuclear war would go overwhelmingly against the Russians even if it resulted in grave damage to the U.S.. And as such, the Soviet propaganda machine was in overdrive encouraging belief in “blowing the world up many times over”, “Mutually Assured Destruction”, “Nuclear Winter”, “No winners in a nuclear war”, “endless and unwinnable arms race” and so on. Why do you think that the Safeguard and later Star Wars ABM systems provoked the liberal establishment into such a frenzy in a way that offensive systems never did?
OK, another data point — Hollywood or dare I say Shepperton Studios. The whole premise was that the U.S. had overwhelming superiority in nuclear arms, the putative smugness of this superiority lampooned by having the George C Scott character say, “With all due respect Mr. President, I think we should finish what (the Sterling Hayden character) started. If we hit them now with everything we’ve got, they’d barely be able to touch the hairs on the back of our neck — 10 million American casualties . . . tops!” The “Macguffin” propelling the plot of Dr. Strangelove is that the Russians, unable to compete with American military might, reverted to an automated Doomsday Machine, where “bombs, unlimited in size” would be detonated on their own soil in response to an attack, to which Dr. Strangelove, the German-expat U.S. defense scientist replied that our side had “thought about that one too” but in pointing out the advantages and drawbacks, thunders at the Russian ambassador, “What is the point of having a Doomsday Machine if you don’t tell the world!”
I am not saying that fictional movies are the source of information about atomic war fighting strategy, but of all the movies on the subject, Dr. Strangelove is the closest to “getting it right” in that the U.S. indeed had overwhelming superiority, could indeed launch a first strike, and the only hope the Russians had of a counter was some exotic scheme — in real life there was some talk of some Russian ICBMS having biological rather than nuclear warheads, of some kind of “dead man’s switch” radio network in Russia to automatically launch a retaliatory strike after the national leadership had been lost, and so on.
So to keep the record straight, maybe what kept the peace during the Cold War was not a bi-lateral standoff in atomic weapons but of the U.S. maintaining overwhelming nuclear superiority while allowing the Russians the face-saving fiction of having some level of parity. If this was indeed the case, this needs to become more widely known that we can draw lessons from it.
