The "MAD" in the title is an acronym. It stands for Mutual Assured Destruction. It was popularized in the '60s when nuclear weapons and nuclear strategy were important subjects of discussion and people were expected to have an informed opinion on them. By the time the '60s came to an end the subject had, for the most part, faded to the background. Reagan revived it for a time in the '80s but not at the level of intensity of previous times. It has since faded to almost complete invisibility. "What? Is that still a thing?" is the extent of most people's recent thinking on the subject. And then Trump came along. It is one of dozens of subjects he has treated irresponsibly. It has become apparent to me that a refresher on the subject is now in order.
Nuclear Physicists of the late '30s were the first to theorize that "nuclear reactions" could produce fantastic amounts of energy. Why? Because of Einstein's famous "E equals M C squared" equation. Colloquially translated it says you can turn a tiny amount of matter into a whole lot of energy. The reverse is also true. You can change a whole lot of energy into a tiny amount of matter. But no one wants to do that. Anyhow, they noticed that if they smashed atoms sometimes a small amount of mass (the scientific term for matter) went missing. The mass was transformed into energy, a lot of energy. And a lot of energy getting released quickly is an explosion.
This set off the race to create the atomic or "A" bomb. Richard Rhodes has written an excellent book, "The Making of the Atomic Bomb", that goes into the effort necessary to do this in great detail. (He also wrote a very good follow up, "Dark Sun", about the Hydrogen bomb.) It was a race because the Germans were trying to do the same thing. Details on their efforts can be found in the excellent "Heisenberg's War" by Thomas Powers. Spoiler: the first effort succeeded while the second one failed.
The U.S dropped two A bombs on Japan. Each released roughly 10 kilotons of energy. How much is that? The biggest conventional World War II bomb was the "block buster", so called because it was powerful enough to level a city block. It contained 10,000 pounds (or 5 tons) of high explosive. So the bombs dropped on Japan were roughly 2,000 times as powerful. Each one leveled a city.
The Russians developed a similar bomb only a few years later. An extensive and successful spying effort was only partly responsible. This led to the race to develop the "H" (for Hydrogen) bomb. The original A bombs (there were several designs) were "fission" bombs. You hit the nucleus of a Uranium atom with a neutron and it broke into pieces (a fission process). The pieces weighed slightly less than the original atom so energy was released. Smashing two Hydrogen atoms together (a fusion process) could, in the right circumstances, produce a single Helium atom. And it weighed less than the two Hydrogen atoms that went into its creation. And it turned out that the amount of energy released by this single "fusion" reaction was a lot more than the its equivalent fission reaction. So an H bomb could be a lot more powerful.
H bombs are rated in megatons, millions of tons of energy, not thousands. One A bomb could wipe out a small city like Hiroshima. An H bomb could wipe out the biggest of cities, say New York, and also take out a big chunk of the surrounding countryside. But it turns out that there is a point of diminishing returns. H bombs are so powerful that they literally blow the top off of our roughly 100 mile thick atmosphere. This creates a funnel and as it gets bigger more and more of the bomb's energy gets funneled out into space. Anything bigger than about 10 megatons just throws more energy into space without flattening more of the countryside. And this is just the first example of the topsy turvey logic that routinely surfaces when talking about nuclear weapons and nuclear strategy.
The A bomb that the US dropped on Nagasaki was the last A bomb the US possessed at the time. Fortunately Japan sued for surrender a couple of days later so it didn't matter. And at the time there didn't seem to be any rush to make more. That changed when the Russians exploded their A bomb. All of a sudden it seemed important to have lots of them on hand. And it was important not just to be able to make them but also to be able to deliver them to whatever presumably Russian target we chose to select.
By this time Japan was an ally and Russia was the enemy. When the US dropped its two A bombs on Japan we had been at war with them for several years and had achieved total air superiority. So we could just fly our B-29 bombers wherever we wanted to and drop the bombs wherever we wanted to. But Russia had an extensive and sophisticated military that had a powerful and sophisticated air defense system that would need to be overcome should we wish to "nuke" them.
This caused the US to spend a lot of money and, among other things, develop the B-52 bomber. The first one was built in the late '50s and the last one, the B-52H, was built midway through the '60s. Even so it was not considered a sure thing. An entertaining way to learn something of what would be involved is to take a look at the classic Stanley Kubrick movie "Dr. Strangelove: or how I learned to love the bomb".
There was another thing going on. The SAC (Strategic Air Command) initiative that included the B-52 was a US Air Force show. And that left the other services, especially the US Navy, out. The Navy's response was to develop the guided missile submarine, commonly referred to as a "boomer". This was barely possible to pull off in the '60s but a decade or so later the Navy deployed the Ohio class submarine and its associated Trident missile. This missile carrying submarine became the second leg of what was eventually called "the nuclear triad". (The bombers constituted the first leg.)
The Russians put a small satellite called Sputnik into orbit around the earth in '57. This was scary because it was thought that any missile powerful enough to put a satellite in orbit, even a small one, was powerful enough to hurdle a nuke thousands of miles. It could be made into an ICBM, an Inter-Continental Ballistic Missile. At the time there was no defense against ICBMs. So a bunch of rockets were built and put into "silos" in the '60s. This was the third leg of the nuclear triad.
It would have made sense for this to be an Army project as this would give each of the three major services its own leg. But in a deft political maneuver the Air Force retained control of the missiles. So the final score was: Air Force - 2; Navy - 1, and Army - 0. This caused the Army out of a sense of desperation to develop a miniaturized A bomb that could be fired from a big gun, an artillery field piece. This was styled a "tactical nuclear weapons system" and was thought by some people to be suitable for use on the battlefield. Does this sound crazy or what?
Well, I did warn you about topsy turvey thinking. And that brings me back to MAD. A justification can be made for the US use of nukes in World War II. I think it is a legitimate justification but I don't want to go into this in the depth necessary to justify my position now. And what became slowly apparent in the decades following World War II was that nuclear weapons were just too horrible in the amount of death and destruction they produced to actually be used. There were serious and prolonged discussions about using them in the Korean War. But the very same President who authorized their use in World War II, Harry Truman, also decided to not use them in Korea. There were some times when things were going really bad for the US in that war but he decided "no" anyhow.
By the time Vietnam came along there was a strong consensus that they should not be used there. And remember this is the same '60s that saw the B-52 program wrapping up, the US ICBM system built and deployed and the development and early deployment of missile carrying submarines. So it was not as if there wasn't a lot of talking and thinking going on about nukes. And there was a hell of a lot of money being spent on them by the military at the time. The military's thinking goes strongly along the lines of "if you have it - use it". But the '60s was also the time that the concept of MAD became completely accepted. So what's the MAD concept and why did it cause the military to eventually be okay with not using nukes?
It is associated with one word: deterrence. "If both sides have them then neither side will use them." But there have been many examples of "them" where both sides had them and used them. Just to cite one example, both sides had and used airplanes in World War I. So what was different about nukes? To explain, I need to discuss "first strike" and "second strike".
Say you have a missile in a silo. What and why is a silo? In this case it is a heavily fortified hole in the ground. The idea is that if the bad guys don't whap the silo directly on the head and don't also hit it really hard the rocket in the silo will still work just fine when the dust settles. So what's the best way to take a silo and the missile it contains out? A nuke, of course. If you can explode a nuke close to the silo it will wreck enough destruction to take the missile out. This is an example of a first strike. If you strike first (and especially if you take them by surprise) and if you can take out enough of their stuff then they don't have enough left to launch an effective second strike (a strike that is launched after your first strike).
At this point in the discussion it appears that the best military strategy is to strike first. And that's a good way to make World War III happen. It didn't take long to figure this out. So what's the counter? Again, there is a single word: survivability. If enough of your stuff survives a first strike to give you the ability to make a powerful second strike then a first strike all of a sudden becomes a bad idea.
Hardened missile silos are a part of this. If you do it right then the bad guys must be able to very accurately target their bombs and the bombs must get through. With bombers it meant putting up a powerful air defense to guard against enemy bombers was a good idea. The US put together NORAD and the DEW line (what they actually are is not that important so I am going to skip that). The Russians did the same thing. Stealth did not exist at that time. So if you say launched a first strike bomber attack you were gambling that you could surprise the other side. If you didn't they could just launch everything too. There would be nothing left on the ground when your bombers got to their bases. You were also gambling that your bombers could somehow make it through in great enough numbers to deliver a knockout punch. You were never 100% sure it would work so a first strike was always a risk.
With missiles it took one missile to take out another missile so the math did not work out. MIRV (I'll get to what it is later) came later. Submarines were basically impossible to find but at the time they were hard to communicate with and, for various reasons, not that accurate. And both sides built and deployed a lot of gear. Even if you got say 80% of it there was so much left. And having three legs of the triad meant if you figured out how to deal with two of the legs the third leg was enough. You had to take out all three legs at the same time or it wouldn't work.
And that brings us to MAD. If both sides are pretty sure that the other side can do serious damage even after a first strike then we have a "mutually assured destruction" scenario. In that scenario it is obviously best all around if no one starts anything. And that's what happened. No nuclear weapon has been used in anger since August of 1945.
But it is important to understand that this situation is fragile. It depends on MAD. So let's look at how to un-mutual things. The first thing is to improve the likelihood of the nuke getting through. You "stealth" the airplane. This is hard to do. But hard really only means expensive. The better you can make your offensive capability the better the other guys have to make their defensive capability. The basic idea of the B-52 was "fly high". But the Russians shot down a U-2 spy plane successfully in 1960 and U-2s fly a lot higher than B-52s. And RADAR has gotten better. And there are other tricks. They too are expensive but there are ways to detect stealth planes.
How about missiles? Well, there's MIRV. MIRV stands for Multiple Independent Reentry Vehicles. If you put 10 nukes on one missile then you can take out 10 silos with one missile, if they are accurate. If you have the same number of missiles and silos as the other guy you can use 10% of your missiles to take out all of his missiles. That leaves 90% of your missiles to use to wipe out his cities. MIRV technology was extremely destabilizing. The only argument for it was "if we don't do it they will do it and we will be in trouble". Unfortunately, these kinds of arguments frequently carry the day.
One piece of good news is that battlefield nukes were quietly retired. No reason was ever given but it was good thing. But battlefield nukes are the basis for "suitcase" nukes. The scenario is that a bad guy carries a nuke across the border in a suitcase and gets by customs. He then sets it up in a city, gets out of dodge and a short time later, boom -- no city. Fortunately, so far this scenario has remained an entirely fictional one. And just how big and how heavy a suitcase nuke would have to be is deeply classified so we don't know how practical it actually is. Both the Russians and the US claim they have dismantled all their tactical nukes. So maybe we really don't have anything to worry about here.
Submarines used to not be able to determine their position very accurately. And missiles were even less capable of accurately guiding themselves. But we now have GPS. If a GPS receiver can be fit into an iPhone it can certainly be fit into a submarine and a missile. So the whole accuracy problem has been completely fixed when it comes to submarines and missiles. And that too is a destabilizing development.
And the nuclear artillery shell has been replaced by the cruise missile. Early cruise missiles were explicitly designed to carry nuclear weapons. And cruise missiles are very good at defeating air defense systems. The US did a deal with Russia and there are now no more nuclear cruise missiles being deployed. The development and deployment of nuclear cruise missiles is definitely a destabilizing development because they are so hard to detect or stop.
Both the US and Russia spent a number of decades growing their nuclear arsenals. This was shorthanded to the Arms Race. And fortunately both sides at some point decided "this is stupid". Both sides were spending fantastic amounts of money in the pursuit of security and it wasn't working. Things came to a head under the Reagan Administration. Reagan proposed something called the Strategic Defense Initiative, SDI, but usually referred to by its unofficial nickname: Star Wars. Every cockamamie idea anyone had come up with for how to build a nuclear shield that would actually defend effectively against a nuclear attack was trotted out.
Experts looked at each and every one. They quickly found holes in all of them. Either the technique would never work or there was a cheap and simple fix that would render the technique ineffective. But in the short run these arguments were ignored. Instead billions of dollars had to be poured into the ideas. And, as had been predicted each and every idea flamed out, often spectacularly. The US spent many billions of dollars. This in turn caused the Russians to spend many billions of dollars. Neither side made any progress. Fortunately, this laid the ground work for some great arms reduction initiatives late in Reagan's second term. It also ended up spelling the death knell for the idea of trying to beat the MAD system. Until Trump came along pretty much everyone decided that the prudent course was to leave everything alone.
That is except for one thing. How about getting rid of nukes? The obvious place to start was to begin reducing the size of the arsenals. The early going was easy. Both sides had way more nukes than they needed so it was easy to get an agreement to scale things back. And that agreement worked well so we have since seen a number of agreements for scaling things back even more. Continue the process long enough and you get to zero. And a large number of people think zero is a good number. Their argument is simple. If there are no nukes then there are no nukes and it is impossible for something horrible to go wrong. And as far as it goes it's a good argument.
But if we have no nukes what happens of someone gets a few nukes? Then you have real problems. There are a number of current nuclear powers. It is not hard for them to save away the know how. And that means that they could go from no nukes to some nukes pretty quickly. And numbered among these are Pakistan and North Korea. Neither of these countries are known for their stability and their commitment to rationality. A world where only North Korea has nukes is a truly scary place.
But getting the whole "nuclear deterrent" thing to work only depends on having a few nukes, say a couple of hundred. That is more than enough. So how about setting a target of say 200-400? That makes perfect sense to me. But there are practical problems.
Remember the whole "each service needs its toy" thing I laid out above. It's still true. A lot of military types, both the uniform types and the bureaucratic types, measure their worth by the size of their budget. A lot of waste and fraud in the military sector can be traced to efforts to get one budget or another increased to the same size as the ego of the man (or rarely woman) in charge. And lots of these people are very skilled political infighters.
Let's look at the Navy because I have the numbers handy for them. Their current boomer is the Ohio class submarine. Originally it carried 24 trident missiles in 24 launch tubes. And each of them was MIRVed so that it had 10 warheads. (BTW, the fact that the warhead count is 10 is widely known but top secret anyhow.) So each Ohio class submarine had 240 nukes onboard. And, if we assume a fleet of 10, that's a total of 2,400 nukes in the fleet. That's a lot of nukes and it represents only one of three legs of the US nuclear triad.
Now let's look at the limits set by the most recent nuclear treaty, the "New START" (START - STrategic Arms Reduction Treaty - always assume an acronym unless proven otherwise) treaty. The US (Russia must adhere to the same limits) is allowed a total of 700 deployed ICBMs (missiles in silos), SLBMs (Submarine Launched Ballistic Missiles - Tridents), and heavy bombers (B-52s or the newer B-1s and B-2s). These can include a total of 1,550 warheads. The US is also allowed a total of 800 "deployed and non-deployed" launchers. If we have all 700 allowed deployed launchers then an additional 100 non-deployed, i.e. down for maintenance and upgrades, etc., launchers would be allowed. If we have fewer deployed launchers we can have more non-deployed launchers.
But according to the math above Ohio class submarines account for 240 of 700 (34%) allowed launchers and 2,400 of 1,550 (160%) warheads. Oops! It turns out that the US has down-rated the submarines from 24 to 16 launch tubes. So we have 160 missiles and 1,600 warheads. (I presume that the Tridents have been down rated from 10 warheads to some lesser number. But its all classified so I don't know what the number is.)
And in this topsey turvery world the US and Russia agree to do what would otherwise be really stupid things. They routinely do certain things in certain ways so that the other side can verify what they are doing by using spy satellites. That's how the Russians know that 8 launch tubes are disabled. I have no idea how they know how much the MIRV count has been reduced on the missiles. In a normal world each country would go to great lengths to hide what they were up to.
But wait. There's more. The Ohio class submarines have been around a while. Well, not as long as the B-52's but still. Anyhow, that means that the Navy has plans for a replacement. God knows what each new submarine will cost. The Navy plan is for 12 boats, each of which will have 16 launch tubes. That's 192 missiles or 27% of the total allowed number. The MIRV factor is classified so I don't know what the total warhead count will be for whatever missile is eventually used. This all fits (just barely) under the current limits. (Remember the Air Force is fighting for each and every bomber and missile it can and the Army is still feeling seriously left out.)
But how many boats and how many missiles per boat we need and what MIRV factor should we expect if everything has to fit under a 400 warhead cap. Trust me. The Navy was not happy to be told it had to plug up 8 of each Ohio class boat's launch tubes after they had paid a whole lot of money to have put there in the first place? I am not familiar with how it went with the Air Force. But I'm sure they had to swallow a bunch of down sizing to get to where we are now.
The Navy wants to put its new boat into service in 2034. Is it going to make sense to build 12 of them then? Probably not. And it is always a good idea to ask for more than you want to start with. Then when your "ask" is cut back you end up with what you expected all along. But every cut to the limits on our nuclear arsenal from here on will meet with fierce resistance from our military, the civilians that manage them, and the contractors that work for them. They all want a newer fatter ox not some skinnied down shadow of the old version.
I have just covered just the most important points and I have purposely not gone into any kind of depth. There is also a lot of nuance I have avoided in the interests of brevity. Millennials can be forgiven for having not spent a lot of time learning about and thinking about this sort of thing. By the time they came along things had been pretty much settled. But anyone who aspires to become President of the United States should know all this and hopefully a lot more. They should also have spent some time thinking about it.
Donald Trump is old enough to have been through the '60s when MAD and nuclear retaliation and first strike and second strike and deterrence were all subjects that the public had (or at least should have) spent a considerable mount of time thinking about. I certainly did. And I am confident Hillary Clinton did. But if Mr. Trump has even the least bit of knowledge or insight into these issues it is totally missing from his public comments.
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