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War

Mutually Assured Destruction

With the conflict between India and Pakistan reaching a point of crisis, the threat of nuclear war is once again on the minds of many. Duncan Richter, Dylan Suzanne and Robert M. Martin discuss the logic behind the Cold War and the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction.

To many the idea of mutually assured destruction never made any sense. Now that it seems to be coming back with the resurgence of hostility between India and Pakistan, it is worth trying to make sense of it.

For a policy called MAD it is perhaps not surprising that there is little logic behind the argument in its defence. This is not to say that it is a bad policy however. It is a policy based on psychology rather than logic.

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