A Cold War Satellite Program Called Parcae Revolutionized Signals Intelligence
spectrum.ieee.org
spectrum.ieee.org
It's an excellent book. Used it heavily during my PhD.
[1] https://uk.artechhouse.com/Multiple-Target-Tracking-with-Rad...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42793564 ("A Spy Satellite You've Never Heard of Helped Win the Cold War (ieee.org)", 18 comments)
https://www.militaryaerospace.com/communications/article/143...
The thing about M.A.D. is that there is no right direction on the tilt. An imbalance in either direction encourages all parties to strike first.
They type of imbalance that is being talked about removed the "Mutual". So total destruction of your opponent and minimal to no damage to your side.
This is why things like "decapitation strikes" where you destroy the leadership and prevent enemy launches were considered.
This is also why the U.S. has a nuclear trident: Land ICBM, Sub SLBM and Strategic bombers that are ready to take off the moment a launch is detected. To ensure that for any strike against the U.S. there would be retaliation.
What the imbalance or lack of mutual would lead to is either:
A. Stronger force strikes first in order to win the conflict.
B. Weaker force strikes first because they know that stronger force will strike to try and win.At the height of the cold war, something like 1/3 of all SAC bombers were airborne at any time. They rotated a la shift changes to ensure there was no delay and minimized risk of not getting some off the ground. The fact there were not more Broken Arrow incidents is pretty amazing
The type of imbalance I responded to was characterized as a "tilt". Overly simplistic models of MAD have a tendency to become completely divorced from reality. There was imbalance, real and perceived, in one direction or another, throughout the Cold War and right up to today, but so far nuclear war hasn't started despite what those simplistic models say. For one, those models overestimated the willingness of politicians on either side to commit mass murder simply because they have an opportunity. Secondly, they overestimate the tolerance for even the risk of just a single counter-value retaliatory strike managing to get through. The retaliation does not have to be total, the destruction not mutually balanced, for the threat of retaliation to still serve as effective deterrence.
If you assume that folks don't want to murder millions of other humans just on general principle (without giving evidence, I think this is true), then there is the position C:
"regardless of the balance of destructive power, people try to avoid mass murder and maintain relationships through politics".
I have two suspicions:
First, the folks running the US (given thier history of slavery and genocide) often do not see other groups of humans as "human", and thus would make the calculation you're making. SO I can totally see why you'd assume US leaders think that way.
I also suspect that a core tenant of US propaganda is to assert that every country on earth would enslave every human. And thus the US is just following its manifest destiny in attempting to do so, via economic, political, or military means.
Those are just suspicions.
However, I think looking at things such as the Cuban Missile Crisis, US incursions into Korea in the 50s, the actual treatment by the USSR/Stalin of Vietnam and other national movements, and the split between the USSR and China-- looking at those things, I've had a hard time buying the "international communist conspiracy", especially when put up against what the US actually did to destabilize places like Guatamala, Iran, Indonesia, Brazil, Vietnam, etc.
That is to say, I think the folks running the USSR and China during the so-called cold war were actually focused on trying to unfuckup the dumb things that they did in transitioning their agriculture- I just don't buy (looking at how these countries dealt with each other) that they had the same willingness to murder half the planet by burning them to a crisp.
I disagree....
My understanding of the MAD philosophy is not that it was born out of psychotics but rather a rather cold, rational war gaming process.
From Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_assured_destruction >It is based on the theory of rational deterrence, which holds that the threat of using strong weapons against the enemy prevents the enemy's use of those same weapons. The strategy is a form of Nash equilibrium in which, once armed, neither side has any incentive to initiate a conflict or to disarm.
You have to put yourself in time and place of those who developed the theory: Coming out of the Second World War where both the United States and the Soviet Union were convinced that each other were planning on taking the other over, this is what drove the USSR to develop the atomic bomb and the US to start NATO.
Fear, not psychopathy drove their actions.
>folks running the US (given thier history of slavery and genocide) often do not see other groups of humans as "human", and thus would make the calculation you're making.
The same argument can be made for any group of people around the world, almost every society has done the same thing.(There a a few, small groups that may not have i.e. small tribes in the Amazon)
> The strategy is a form of Nash equilibrium…
Ahem. (cough cough)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Forbes_Nash_Jr.#Mental_il...
Otherwise we would paint all applications of the AC induction motor with the same brush as Tesla had mental issues as well.
On the other hand, I think that being willing to murder millions of people for literally any reason might be a marker of some psychiatric issue.
Deciding that it can come down to "cold reason" just makes it worse.
themaninthedark, I understood your position before you restated it.
For instance, when you wrote "almost every society has done the same thing.(There a a few, small groups that may not have i.e. small tribes in the Amazon)" , the "few small groups" is exactly what I am talking about when I describe how people in this culture "do not see other groups of humans as "human"".
I understand, deeply and intimately, this idea because it's so prevalent that it is almost like water surrounding fish.
I suppose that to be a "real" civilization is to be willing and able to incinerate the planet (through economic or military power), so it's no surprise that you're not seeing the vast majority of folks on the planet who despise that line of thought.
That desire to dominate has often seemed to me to be the resurgence of the buried Christian Dominionism which has been repressed to the root of most classically liberal thought- if you can't control yourself through reason then are you a person? If you can't dispose of the world through the dictates of your reason, are you really a government?
Very cool, basically inverted GPS.
I do wish that myth would die. All nuclear players during the Cold War intended to "win" at nuclear war fighting; MAD was never a doctrine.
In fact MAD was popularised by McNamara to mock the concept!
> The cornerstone of our strategic policy continues to be to deter nuclear attack upon the United States or its allies. We do this by maintaining a highly reliable ability to inflict unacceptable damage upon any single aggressor or combination of aggressors at any time during the course of a strategic nuclear exchange, even after absorbing a surprise first strike. This can be defined as our assured-destruction capability.
> Security depends upon assuming a worst plausible case, and having the ability to cope with it. In that eventuality we must be able to absorb the total weight of nuclear attack on our country -- on our retaliatory forces, on our command and control apparatus, on our industrial capacity, on our cities, and on our population -- and still be capable of damaging the aggressor to the point that his society would be simply no longer viable in twentieth-century terms. That is what deterrence of nuclear aggression means. It means the certainty of suicide to the aggressor, not merely to his military forces, but to his society as a whole.
https://www.atomicarchive.com/resources/documents/deterrence...
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McNamara used the term "assured destruction" over and over again it became a cornerstone of his policy. Later a civilian added an "M" to MAD, and the term caught on.
Here's an interview transcript from much later, in 1987:
INT: Much has been made during this period of the term 'MAD', Mutually Assured or..
RM: Yes..
INT: ......Destruction. Can you explain what was meant by that?
RM: It's not mad! (laugh) Mutual Assured Destruction is the foundation of deterrence.
RM: Today it's a derogative term , but those that denigrate it don't understand deterrence. If you want a stable nuclear world -- if that isn't an oxymoron -- , to rephrase it, to the degree one can achieve a stable nuclear world, it requires that each side be confident that it can deter the other.
The consequences of this were very nearly catastrophic, as the speed at which communication occurred was just so slow, with intel and news coming in so very very slowly. Discussions were being made in the dark and were outdated or based on outdated incorrect assumption.
I think there was considerably more luck than we’d like in the ‘system’ we engineered.