French President Emmanuel Macron said it would be “madness” to ignore the threat Russia has become for Europe and said he is open to discussing the extension of France’s nuclear deterrence to Paris’s European allies.
French President Emmanuel Macron said it would be “madness” to ignore the threat Russia has become for Europe and said he is open to discussing the extension of France’s nuclear deterrence to Paris’s European allies.
Wouldn’t mind a cold one tbh
It’s only cold because, if slightly anything goes awry, humanity ceases to exist.
That was terrifying sixty years ago. Nowadays lots is going wrong and we’re actively leaning into the destruction of our habitat.
Not placing any false equivalencies on the table here, MAD would be worse. It’s just that we’re used to the idea by now, too numb.
And there’s rituals and rules with gravity surrounding them now. During the Cuban missile crisis nukes were seen as just another weapon. At this point they’re more like symbols of state that you can hypothetically end the world with.
I have to quibble with the idea that they were seen that way during the cold war. There was plenty of that attitude going around when America had the bomb alone of all others, but by the bay of pigs and all that, the logic of MAD was fully in effect. The field of game theory was being studied at that time by RAND specifically around possible applications with nuclear warfare.
I don’t know if there’s one prevailing mindset around nukes today, but I think we can both agree that the less people see them as mere weaponry, the better. I also fear that the ‘madman theory’ of Nixon’s era is still being applied by too many rogue nations (in which I now include the US, personally). Such charades are eventually fatal.
Early vs. late 60’s makes all the difference here. MAD was first coined in 1962, which is the year in question, so obviously it hadn’t grown to the point of being official doctrine, let alone a global, immovable strategic equilibrium. I’m not a professional historian, so maybe I’m missing something, but this has been my take on the period.
In the 70’s the system as we know it starts to develop, and you see the ABM treaty signed as a symptom of this.