However, there is some evidence that mutually assured destruction doesn’t actually work. Although no nuclear war has killed off humanity to this day, there have been a lot of close calls. The Cuban missile crisis brought us close to a nuclear holocaust. After the U.S. found out that the Soviet Union installed nuclear-armed missiles in Cuba, close to U.S. soil, the U.S. claimed it was ready to use military force to neutralize this threat if necessary. 9 If the U.S. had acted, we might not be here today. In the middle of the film Ice Station Zebra, this Trope is discussed (" a wonderful acronym, if there ever was one!") as part of the rapid-fire Info Dump that explains why the film's MacGuffin (a surveillance satellite that went down near the titular polar station and which contains on film the precise locations of all the nuclear silos on Russia and North America) is so important: such information would surely allow the enemy to devise a "survivable" battle strategy for an all-out nuclear assault. Onboard this submersible drone is an absolutely massive warhead–with some claims saying it carries the same nuclear yield as the RS-28, and others claiming twice that. According to some Russian officials, the Status-6 can be equipped with a 100 megaton weapon… which is two times more powerful than the largest nuclear weapon ever even tested. Campbell Craig and Sergey Radchenko, "MAD, not Marx: Khrushchev and the nuclear revolution." Journal of Strategic Studies (2018) 41#1/2:208-233.

Perhaps the views of the defense policy luminary Paul Nitze serve as a good snapshot of the Cold War consensus among policymakers about nuclear weapons. Nitze stands out as a unique player in the defense politics of the time, due to his four decades of experience in government under both Republican and Democratic administrations. After negotiating with him, the Soviets dubbed him the “Silver Fox,” and his biographer, Strobe Talbott, referred to Nitze as the “grey eminence of nuclear diplomacy.”Russian troops have already begun leaving the Chernobyl nuclear plant after getting “significant doses” of radiation. But if a missile dubbed the “Satan II” and marketed as a way to remove Texas from the map isn’t massive enough, Russia also boasts another doomsday nuke–one said to match or even double the nuclear yield of the Sarmat, while bolstering its destructive capacity by creating an unnatural, natural disaster. Experts say this is the world’s most dangerous nuclear moment since the Cold War. “But the old Cold War had safeguards” for most of it, says Dr Bobo Lo, a former Australian diplomat to Moscow. “It wasn’t perfect, but both sides felt they had an understanding on where the red lines lay. This new era has none of that.”

So, are nuclear weapons likely to come into play? How would the West respond? And does nuclear deterrence still work today? McNamara estimated that a nuclear strike force with the equivalent explosive power of 400 megatons of TNT — a "few hundred" missiles, as some military planners said — was needed to ensure an effective nuclear deterrence, according to the Brookings Institution. DEFCON is essentially a Mutually-Assured Destruction Simulator, directly inspired by the War Games example above.The Fallout series of games (which are Spiritual Successors of the Wasteland games) are based in the post-apocalyptic world created by the mutual destruction of a nuclear war between Red China and the United States. While the initial conflict was purely between China and America, virtually every country was involved with one side or the other to a heavy degree which escalated China's Suicidal Cosmic Temper Tantrum into a global thermonuclear war that bathed the entire planet in atomic fire. Ironically, despite being the main target America came out of it better than everyone else ( even taking into account the fact that 99% of its population was wiped out) as much of the planet was rendered entirely uninhabitable, with the series taking the A World Half Full approach. The M.A.D. tank from Command & Conquer: Red Alert is a suicide unit that can destroy anything that isn't infantry in three shots- including itself. Subverted in the lawless Terminus systems, where small states ("small" meaning "only controls one or a few planets") apparently use meteor drops against each other fairly often. They call that 20% of the galaxy the "third galaxy" for a reason. Strategic Air Command Declassifies Nuclear Target List from 1950s". nsarchive.gwu.edu . Retrieved 2016-01-06. Many politicians used the Missile Gap as a talking point in the 1960 presidential election. Yet, in fact, U.S. missile power was superior to that of the Soviet Union at the time. Over the next three decades, however, both countries grew their arsenals to well over 10,000 warheads. Cuban Missile Crisis

The Cold War ended in 1991 following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Berlin Wall. But years earlier, in 1987, the United States and the Soviet Union had signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) to limit the scope and reach of all types of missiles. Treaties designed to disarm and stop the spread of nuclear weapons (such as the Non-Proliferation Treaty) mean the world’s arsenal has shrunk significantly since the end of the Cold War, down from a peak of about 70,000 weapons in 1986 to an estimated 12,700 today, according to the American Federation of Scientists, although this is often due to the retirement of older missiles. Countries such as Libya and Iran, which have attempted to create their own nuclear weapons since (or, in the case of Iraq, were thought to be trying), have often faced harsh sanctions and even war from the US and its NATO allies. Plous, Scott (1984). "Will Deterrence Survive a Nuclear Winter?". Science. 225 (4659): 268. doi: 10.1126/science.225.4659.268-a. ISSN 0036-8075. JSTOR 1693566. PMID 17749541.

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Their high accuracy (low circular error probable), compared to submarine-launched ballistic missiles which used to be less accurate, and more prone to defects; Former US intelligence official Christopher Chivvis writes that scores of war games carried out by the US and its allies have predicted Putin will launch a single nuclear strike if threatened. A demonstration explosion could “make the lights go out in Oslo” and trigger a response in kind from NATO. Even if both sides stop at demonstration detonations, the nuclear taboo will have been broken, “and we are in an entirely new era”, Chivvis writes. This ironically is the peace solution at the end of the 2017 Korean thriller Steel Rain. North Korea agrees to hand over half their nuclear weapons to South Korea, so neither side can risk war without destroying themselves. Stanislav Petrov in 2013. The late former Soviet lieutenant-colonel averted a potential nuclear conflict. Credit: Getty Images

The Coming Race is about a utopian underground society powered by vril. The invention of vril-based weapons ended all war because they're so powerful that a child could wipe out millions of enemy combatants in minutes. It also ended crime, because people can defend themselves so easily. The government can no longer impose its will on the people by force, so people live in loose societies that they move between at will, and the government's purpose is to attend to practical matters rather than enforce laws. In Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty, we have Farewell , which gives you the choice of what to exile: creatures, artifacts, enchantments, graveyards, or any combination of the above. In turn, Britain further expanded the Royal Navy and built more advanced and powerful battlecruisers, including the 1906 HMS Dreadnought, a technically advanced type of warship that set the standard for naval architecture. A detonation of that magnitude would not only destroy and irradiate a massive area, its positioning under water would result in a radioactive tsunami that would reach far further inland than the blast itself. In no uncertain terms, the Status-6 is intended to serve as a doomsday weapon. It’s the sort of weapon you build not to win wars, but to end them. A South Korean TV news bulletin shows North Korean leader Kim Jong Un after his country conducted a nuclear test in 2016. Credit: Getty Images

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After finishing this masterly work, I am left with three main thoughts. First, it seems like American policymakers got more right than wrong about the Cold War nuclear arms competition. Second, I wonder now if victory was in fact possible in a nuclear war. Finally, can Green’s theory explain competition and arms control before and after the groovy 1970s?