Mutually assured destruction
by Michael Maiello

They say the MAD doctrine kept us alive through the Cold War. No one with nukes would ever use them, because the response would wipe out both sides. There was no good way of stopping the response, so a stalemate remained for fifty years. Then, the Soviet economy collapsed. MAD is still in effect. Nuclearized nations can't use their weapons for fear of counter attack. But, all the recent talk of biological weapons got me thinking about Mutually Assured Destruction again.

I don't know if weapons can really be ranked once you get up to the nuclear, chemical, and biological level. What's hairier? Radiation poisoning, or contracting some mutating virus and passing it on to everyone around you? I've long thought the Iraqi viral threat has been overblown in order to make them look scarier, meaner, and worthier. We'll say anything to make them look like an opponent worth our time. Remember when they had the fourth largest army in the world?

But, the recent and probably ongoing Iraqi crises was about weapons control. The United Nations is pretty much run by nuclear powers, and they don't want anyone else to have weapons of mass destruction. Which strikes me as a vain attempt. After all, nuclear weapons come from a rather simple splitting of the atom. Atoms make up everything and everyone has access to them. Eventually, any culture with technological designs will learn to master the atom, and fission is a pretty simple step in that direction. So, no matter what trade sanctions and treaties we've used to slow technological progress in other countries, an understanding of the atom is inevitable if they are inclined towards technology or physics. So, eventually, everyone will have nukes. Or, lots of people will.

So, as a thought experiment, I wondered, at this point, if MAD would work on a global scale. If every political country had nukes, what would happen. Would we still fight conventional wars, or would someone use them? I am purposefully dismissing any "mad leader" theories because they're generally based in racism and stereotypical notions of the "crazy Arab" or "whacky communist dictator" and other labels which have come right out of our own propaganda rather than objective fact.

Even discounting the "mad leader" syndrome, and assuming that the weapons are in governmental hands and not like to be used by terrorists (a big assumption, but a terrorist would have to know that if their home country were to be identified, retaliation would wipe out their friends and family), I don't think MAD can work.

The reason is "Star Wars." Ronald Reagan's "Strategic Defense Initiative" is still be worked on by our government and probably Russia's. Actually, it never has to work to be valid. The point is only that the knowledge and techniques which allowed us to build atomic weapons fifty years ago will likely allow us to create counter measures in the near future. So, you could nuclearize the plant right now, and within a few weeks some country would find a countermeasure which would give them a strategic edge and blow MAD out of the water. So, we get more escalation, and more escalation, and more escalation.

Okay, no one is suggesting we actually nuclearize the world, or allow the world to nuclearize. But the whole Iraqi thing got me thinking that we can't really do anything about it. We can delay people all we want, we can put up roadblocks and use trade sanctions to force their activities underground. But we can't actually stop it, and I don't think we can rely on MAD to save us twice.

Which means we're still, even after the Cold War, headed down a path of global escalation that could kill us all. Which means we still have to work on a paradigm shift on a global scale. Which to me means a bigger role for the U.N., so I'm all for Kofi Annan brokering a deal to keep us from bombing Iraq and I hope they keep doing that. During the Cold War, the threat was under our noses and over our heads. Now, it's lingering in the future. We need to address this now before global proliferation and escalation make the next century even more dangerous than our own bloody era.

Michael Maiello re-read The Butter Battle Book last week.

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