The doctrine of mutual assured destruction, or MAD for short, has often been referred to in very derogatory terms as something you would literally have to be crazy to believe in. (I have also seen the “M” term in the acronym as “massive” – for our purposes here, either one is correct.) Yet, the idea behind MAD was actually pretty sound in both theoretical and practical terms.

The theory and practice of MAD came into being in the 1960s once the US realised it no longer possessed an absolute qualitative and quantitative edge against the USSR’s nuclear arsenal. The basic idea can be summed up as: “you kill us, we will kill you right back”. Anyone reading this who grew up during the Cold War will recognise the practical reality of this doctrine. If the US or USSR launched a major nuclear strike at the other, the other side would respond with an overwhelming salvo of nuclear death that would wipe out the instigator. The result would be nuclear apocalypse – the total destruction of all human life on Earth.

There is considerable debate as to whether MAD was sensible, or even sane. But the core of the idea was actually very simple, and very defensible – the people on each side did not want to die in nuclear fire, and wanted their children to live on.

This idea can be easily defended using mathematics – if you assume that both sides are rational and understand incentives. (Keep this fact in mind, it is very important for what follows.) MAD can be mathematically represented as a sort of extremely high-stakes sequential repeated Prisoner’s Dilemma game, possibly under imperfect information, with the incentives well known and understood, and with a “Grim Trigger” strategy in place for both sides.

Nuclear Restraints

Under such a game, equilibrium is possible in which neither side uses nuclear weapons, out of fear that the other will retaliate in a truly horrendous way. In a rather terrible sort of way, MAD probably did, in the final analysis, prevent the USA from overreaching during its wars in Asia.

As cynical as that sounds, the evidence supports the notion that MAD actually did work.

When Gen. Douglas Macarthur demanded strategic air attacks on China, President Truman overruled him, for fear this would lead to dramatic escalation up to and beyond the nuclear threshold with the USSR – and Gen. Omar Bradley‘s secret testimony to the Senate at the time, confirmed the validity of this fear.

In America’s Syracuse Expedition against Vietnam, Gen. William C. Westmoreland enacted a secret plan to give nuclear weapons to the South Vietnamese. President Johnson – hardly a paragon of peacemaking himself – vetoed the plan when he found out about it, because of the stakes involved in escalating to a nuclear conflict against the USSR and China.

All of that changed after the Cold War ended.

After the collapse of the USSR, the subsequent actions of the American Empire have clearly illustrated the sheer deterrent power of MAD against hegemonic imperialism – because once the spectre of total destruction of the USA and its allies disappeared, America almost immediately embarked on a series of amazingly stupid ventures that have since severely destabilised the entire world.

America intervened in the Balkans conflicts in the mid-1990s because it was no longer afraid of Russian retaliation. It attacked Serbia with impunity in 1999 without any real worries of Russia stepping in to defend its historical ally, Serbia. It invaded Iraq over completely ridiculous trumped-up charges of WMD, even though there was no evidence whatsoever that Saddam Hussein planned to attack the US or anyone else with his non-existent weapons. America invaded and destroyed Libya after Col. Muammar Ghaddafi renounced his WMD programmes.

Look at the results since then. All of this demonstrates very clearly that the removal of MAD has made the USSA drunk on power and removed any sense of inhibition or restraint. And all of it serves to underscore the hard truth that any country developing nuclear weapons in the current day and age would be CRAZY to give them up, in the face of American destabilisation and regime change policies.

Ending the MADness

All of this begs the question – how and why did MAD end?

The simple answer is, of course, that it ended when the Cold War did. But that is actually much too simplistic – because MAD really ended years earlier.

Here we need to pause to note one very important fact: the West DID NOT “WIN” THE COLD WAR. This one misconception – that NATO, led by the USA, engineered some sort of overwhelming “victory” over the Evil Empire – has formed the basis of American foreign policy for thirty years. That fateful mistake has led the USSA – the new Evil Empire – down every sort of idiotic misadventure imaginable, and has brought untold suffering and misery to humanity.

I myself have stated repeatedly that the West “won” the Cold War. This was a serious mistake. Recent events, combined with analyses of people whom I respect, have shown me that I was wrong. I will not refer to the Cold War as a “Western victory” again, because it was not one.

In fact, the Cold War ended with a negotiated settlement. It was NEVER an outright victory for the West, it was an honourable peace with an opponent that no longer had the will or means to fight.

The Cold War actually ended in 1988, during the legendary reign of the greatest peacemaker and President of the 20th Century, St. Reagan of the Right. In a seminal speech at the United Nations, on December 7, 1988, Mikhail Gorbachyov (that’s how his name was actually pronounced) dramatically renounced the use of force for the international expansion of the USSR, the demilitarisation of the Iron Curtain, and the massive reduction of the USSR’s armed forced.

THAT was the end of the Cold War, and of MAD – and Reagan Magnus was the great peacemaker who made it happen.

And how exactly did the great man manage this? Through the Strategic Defence Initiative – known colloquially as Star Wars.

Reagan was mocked relentlessly at the time for his vision of high-tech space-based battlestations and orbital defences, which seemed completely crazy at the time to many Western liberals.

Guess who wasn’t laughing, though? The Soviets.

As Peter Schweizer documents in his superb biography, Reagan’s War, the Soviets took SDI extremely seriously, and they performed some analyses on what it meant and how to respond to it. They realised very quickly that SDI, as envisaged by Reagan, would not be able to prevent a first strike by the USSR.

But it WOULD be able to stop the effects of a retaliatory strike, in the event of a NATO first strike.

And that rendered the concept of MAD essentially null and void.

In one move, Reagan not only changed the incentives – he changed the GAME. Which is just one of the reasons behind his greatness.

The Soviets realised quickly that they couldn’t defeat SDI, they couldn’t spend anywhere near enough money to match it (due to their increasingly broken economy), and they couldn’t afford to ignore it. It is THIS set of facts which brought Gorbachyov to the negotiating table at Reykjavik in 1986, where Gorbachyov did everything he could to tempt Reagan to kill SDI – and failed. And it is that failure which led to the Soviet demilitarisation and renunciation of its previously expansionist policies, and therefore the end of the Cold War, and of MAD.

When the Lunatics Run the Asylum

Coming back to the core function of MAD, it worked because of the assumption of rationality on either side. And that assumption held true for the thirty or so years in which MAD held sway. The game-theoretic concept involved here is essentially a Nash Equilibrium – in simple terms, it is a situation in which no player can be made better off without making another one worse off. You can see a very simple one-shot illustration of this above.

Note, Nash Equilibria are not necessarily desirable outcomes. They simply are the best possible outcomes given the circumstances.

However, this ONLY works when you are dealing with rational players who respond to incentives.

If you have many players in a game, and all but one are rational, while that one last player is a complete raving lunatic, then it really doesn’t matter how badly the other players punish him for doing something stupid – he will not respond to incentives and will carry on with his bad behaviour.

This is precisely the situation in which the world finds itself today, with the USSA.

The new Evil Empire, now completely under the grip of the neoclowns and neolibs, has spent the past thirty years breaking every conceivable boundary and restriction of rationality. It went to war in Iraq for absolutely nonsensical reasons. It has destabilised the entire Middle East by trying to kill off secular strongmen like Bashar al-Assad in Syria – resulting in a five-way fustercluck that STILL, nearly 12 years later, has not been resolved, and which almost resulted in outright war between Russia and Turkey.

The Empire of Lies continues to try to bully its way into China and destabilise the Far East by provoking the CPC over Taiwan – when, in reality, the Chinese themselves aim for peaceful reunification between Taiwan and the mainland, sometime in 2050.

Worst and most egregiously of all, the USSA, with the active and happy participation of the European elites, expanded NATO right up to Russia’s borders – in explicit violation of a clear verbal agreement between Gorbachyov and the George H. W. Bush Administration that NATO would not expand so much as one inch eastward.

For decades, the neoclowns and neolibs have provoked and poked Russia, and have absorbed ever more former Warsaw Pact and formerly neutral nations into a military alliance very clearly designed to attack the bear. Finally, when NATO tried to expand into Ukraine, the Russians said, ПЕРЕСТАН!!!, and are now busy comprehensively dismantling NATO’s military power in the killing fields of 404 – Country Not Found.

All of this death and tragedy and instability could have been avoided if the USSA had not become completely drunk on power, and had restrained itself, permitting the nations of the world to evolve under their own development models and accepting the role of a powerful trade- and finance-based liberal democracy with closed borders. But that is the power of hindsight. Back when things were good, during the 1990s, the “American Century” seemed inevitable.

Today, though, we see an increasingly unstable and desperate West, which has taken leave of its sense. And that should make us all extremely worried.

Rational Responses to Lunatics

As the Empire’s military project fails in Banderastan, drowned in the blood of tens of thousands of dead and wounded Ukrainians, it becomes ever more hysterical. And, being led by liars, it can only project its own demented claims about nuclear weapons upon others.

That is the only way to explain the downright crazy reactions of Western politicians to the very calm and actually quite oblique statements by the Russian President, and others, about Russia’s nuclear doctrine. That doctrine is very clear. Russia will only ever use nuclear weapons under two circumstances:

1. In the event that the very survival of the Russian state itself is at stake due to a conventional attack; OR
2. In retaliation against the use of weapons of mass destruction against Russia;

Neither such situation applies in the Banderastan War – yet.

Don’t take my word for it. Here is Putin in his own words, responding to threats of nuclear blackmail by the Western powers back in the late summer:

That is but one of many statements which Putin has made on the subject of nuclear weapons. He spoke extensively on the subject of weapons, nuclear and otherwise, used against Russia in the current and any future conflicts, in his most recent speech before the Collegium of the Russian Ministry of Defence:

In fact, given that Putin is the MODERATE in the Kremlin, relative to real hardliners like Medvedev and Patrushev, his words should give the entire West pause – because they mean, very clearly, that Russia is preparing for the realities of a nuclear war with the West.

Lunacy on Full Display

And he is not the only one in his government talking this way. Russia’s Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov – perhaps the most capable and skilled diplomat alive today – has stated bluntly that the combined West is at war with Russia, and has been for a long time, in a recent interview with TASS. On top of that, Lavrov commented on recent speculations that the West might try a decapitation strike against Russia to kill Putin, possibly with nuclear weapons:

The minister noted that some “‘unnamed officials from the Pentagon actually threatened to conduct a ‘decapitation strike’ on the Kremlin…What we are talking about is the threat of the physical elimination of the head of the Russian state,” he said.

The top diplomat went on to warn against such a line of thinking. “If such ideas are actually being nourished by someone, this someone should think very carefully about the possible consequences of such plans.”

Lavrov was apparently referring to a September article by Newsweek, which alleged that US defense officials are considering a number of options to respond against a potential Russian nuclear strike, including “a decapitation strike to kill Putin in the heart of the Kremlin.”

Fears of a possible nuclear conflict have been sparked in the West after Putin said in September that Moscow would use “all means” necessary to defend Russia and its people if its territorial integrity is threatened. However, Moscow has repeatedly stated that it has no plans to deploy atomic weapons, maintaining that a nuclear war should never be fought.

The only way this Western idea makes any kind of sense, is if you are literally INSANE. The consequences are too terrifying to imagine for anyone with a shred of rationality.

Such a strike might succeed – the Russians have easily the most powerful air defences in the world, but they are far from perfect, and Russia is so huge as to be virtually impossible to defend completely. What would it take for the Empire of Lies to resort to such an attempt?

First, we must understand very clearly that for both Russia and NATO, Ukraine is a no-fail, existential crisis. Losing in Banderastan will mean the total eventual collapse of either Russia or NATO. Winning will result in substantial gains in territory, economic power, military strength, and prestige for either side.

Yet NATO is clearly losing. Ukraine’s military is dying by the thousands, Russian missile and artillery production has ramped up to the point where they launched, just this morning, over 100 missiles (by Ukraine’s count), and successfully destroyed a number of Ukrainian air defence complexes. Russia’s mobilisation is now complete and over 380,000 fresh troops will soon be fully deployed into the conflict zones – over 150,000 of them are already there.

NATO has no more material support left to give. Its militaries are tapped out. All they can supply is money and bullshit, but not real weapony – with one real exception. And that is the USSA.

The US military has apparently been working behind the scenes to stop the neoclowns in the Fake Administration from sending over the longest-ranged and most dangerous American weapons to 404. But the neoclowns have no self-awareness, no concept of admitting defeat, and no reverse gear. They will continue to pour weapons and money into the conflict in the increasingly shrill and desperate hope of bleeding Russia dry – when, in reality, all they are doing is tanking Europe and depleting America.

To them, the destruction of Europe is a non-issue – as Victoria “F**k the EU” Nuland once so inelegantly made clear:

The neoclowns simply want to destroy Russia. And these people are willing to go to any length, destroy anything and anyone, and smash NATO to pieces if they have to, for that specific objective.

They are not rational, in other words. And to them, the threat of utter nuclear destruction therefore does not matter.

It makes no difference to them that the Russians have the largest nuclear arsenal in the world. Nor do they care that Russia is now putting into active service the RS-28 Sarmat, with its 18,000Km range and its ability to attack from the blind spots of American ballistic missile defences, and its multiple Avangard hypersonic glide vehicles which can deliver nuclear warheads at Mach 20. They don’t care about Russia’s Belgorod nuclear submarine with its Poseidon autonomous nuclear drones, which when detonated can unleash a tsunami that would destroy the coastal US (or UK).

They only care about defeating Russia. And that should make the rest of us genuinely very worried.

Conclusion – Si Vis Pacem…

So what happens if – or, as I fear, WHEN – the USSA gets desperate and crazy enough to escalate up to and past the nuclear threshold?

I honestly don’t know. We managed to make it through 2022 without the neoclowns killing everyone on Earth, and since I believe in what the Bible says, I think we will make it through 2023 as well. But the neoclowns appear to be betting, without any justification or proof, that Russia will not try to challenge NATO directly if American, Polish, and Romanian troops enter Ukraine once the Banderite military is destroyed.

I think this is a deeply foolish assumption. The Russians no longer care what the West thinks – Lavrov, Putin, Shoigu, and especially Putin’s heir-apparent, Medvedev, have all said so on multiple occasions. They no longer trust the West and will not hesitate to defend their interests with military force – hence why the Russians are increasing the size of their armed forces to 1.5 million men, and are rapidly strengthening both their conventional and nuclear deterrents.

The only way this ends is if the neoclowns are politically and physically destroyed. They have to be removed from power – but the American people are too cowed and/or apathetic to do so. Therefore, the neoclowns will continue to escalate and double down until the USSA finally collapses – and that will happen pretty much as soon as the petrodollar fails.

That day may be sooner than we think, given the moves made recently by the Saudis and the Chinese to settle oil transactions in RMB. When it comes, the USSA will fall apart in short order, and then, at long last, we might see some semblance of sanity and rationality prevail.

Until that day, though, the rest of us, who fear and hate the idea of nuclear war, are stuck dealing with people so blinded by ideology and power that they are literally insane.