The US and the Soviets amassed so many nuclear weapons
during the 50s and 60s that using them could only result in the destruction of
the entire world, as we know it.
Since the end of the Cold War, nuclear war remains in the
unthinkable category, but for the fundamentalists who see the world as the
stage for their own particular apocalypse, the unthinkable is not so
unthinkable.
The Russian Federation still controls thousands of nuclear
weapons, but the danger has shifted away from the Cold War scenario of one of
the superpowers attacking the other. Then the world worried about living under
the threat of a Superpower nuclear war.
Now the world worries about nations and terrorists who don’t care about
MAD setting off a nuke because they want to kill everybody who does not see the
world as they do.
In the midst of Cold War, Hannah Arendt wrote the book “On Revolutions” talking about the rise in revolutionary thinking from the
Reformation through the American and French Revolutions to the permanent state
of revolution that characterizes the modern world. We can no longer rely on MAD to constrain the
nuclear arsenal. Superpowers cannot divide the world into client states they
can control.
MAD will not protect us. The overwhelming nuclear arsenal we
have is not a threat to someone happy to die to bring on their personal
apocalypse, or to the thug in charge of North Korea who will happily sacrifice
his people on the altar of his own ego.
In a world of revolutions, our security agencies have to
doggedly keep track of all existing nuclear weapons to make sure a terrorist
never gets one.
I liked the Cold War draft army I served in better than the
current all-volunteer army and, I admit, I liked the MAD world a lot better than
the current threat of a nuke delivered in a truck or a shipping container.
