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Donald Brennan of the Hudson Institute coined Mutually Assured Destruction in 1962, choosing the words to spell MAD because he considered the doctrine irrational, yet the sarcastic acronym became the Cold War’s governing logic. The hope behind it was older: Richard Gatling claimed his 1862 gun would show the futility of war, Alfred Nobel hoped dynamite would make armies recoil, and Nikola Tesla promised a particle beam would end war. After Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the Soviet test of 1949, John Foster Dulles’s instant retaliation gave way to Robert McNamara’s insistence on a secure second strike, built on bombers, ICBMs and, from 1959, George Washington class missile submarines.

The logic turned defense into provocation. Fallout shelters and anti-ballistic missile systems such as Nike Zeus and the Soviet A-35 threatened the balance, MIRVs made interceptors futile, and Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative drew objections from Andrei Sakharov, Mikhail Gorbachev and Margaret Thatcher. Classified Proud Prophet war games found that every limited nuclear strike escalated to full exchange, and a 1983 study including Carl Sagan warned of nuclear winter. Near misses showed the doctrine’s reliance on luck: Stanislav Petrov’s judgment of a false launch alarm in 1983 and Vasily Arkhipov’s refusal to approve a nuclear torpedo launch during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

• The Looking Glass airborne command post flew continuously from 1961 to 1990.
• Strategic Air Command kept a third to a half of its bombers ready to fly within 15 minutes.
• A single Peacekeeper missile could carry 10 warheads, a payload equal to about 230 Hiroshima bombs.
• A 2009 study in the Journal of Conflict Resolution supported the stability-instability paradox, in which nuclear stalemate encourages proxy wars.
• Nuclear winter projections put global cooling at 15 to 25 degrees Celsius after even a limited exchange.