What's Mutual Assured Destruction?

During the Cold War, both the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. stockpiled weapons, eventually holding enough power to destroy the world several times over. Yet neither side actually used these weapons. Learn more about M.A.D. in our article on HowStuffWorks.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm editor Candice Getson, joined as always by Josh Curious
like a cat clerk. Hey, Candice, So, I've been smoking

(00:23):
cigarettes dipped in from malde hyde all day and it's
kind of reminded me of my youth um back in
the eighties. How how old were you were you even
sentitioned in the eighties negative six Oh, I was running
around like a wild march hare in the eighties. I
was definitely a child of the Cold War. Thankfully you
didn't really have to live through that. It was kind
of a weird time, right. There's some great movies that

(00:46):
came out of it, like Red Dawn. Have you ever
seen that? Oh my god, that's a good movie. Ruskies,
it's a pretty good one. To War Games. Well, they're
all very good movies, but they kind of created a
mentality in me, my impressionable young from aldehyde addult brain
um of of a fear. Everybody was kind of afraid

(01:07):
during the Cold War. And I remember my earliest experience
at a concert, well one of them. It was a
Howard Jones show at Pine Knob great place to see
a show outdoor Amphitheater in Michigan. Um, and I started crying,
and my older sister looked over at me, like, what's
wrong with you? And I told her I was afraid
that the Russians were gonna hear US and nucas. So, um,
that was kind of the prevailing mentality. I don't know

(01:30):
if everybody cried at Howard Jones shows, but I definitely
wasn't just totally off the chart. So as I get older,
I start to look into this whole thing, you know,
the Cold War, it's a pretty interesting experience. Um, and
I found that we had enough nuclear capability at one
time for either side to wipe one another off the

(01:50):
face of the earth. Was I right to cry at
this Howard Jones show? Was this fact or fiction? Scarily enough,
that's actually fact? And as we know, the Cold War
was are of threats. It was sort of abstract as
far as war goes. There weren't weapons being fired. And
it's sort of blossomed out of tensions between the ideologies
of capitalism the US and communism the U s s R.

(02:13):
The Soviet Union, and both nations were stock piling nuclear weapons. Um.
The United States developed the atom bomb, and then Russia
responded with the hydrogen bomb, and then back and forth.
It was very much a tit for tat and nuclear
proliferation sort of things. There was like a war threats,
but everybody had the goods to back it up. Yeah, yeah,
almost like capital and there was real gold and the

(02:35):
safe Well why why why are we still here? Why
wasn't there that nuclear annihilation that I was so concerned
with as as a youth. That's the kicker. No one
ever used these weapons. People understood, yeah, they're really powerful.
I could wipe out my enemy, but it's tantamount to
suicide firing one because you wipe out yourself too. Well.
The weapons were strong enough to destroy the world a

(02:56):
couple of times over, that's how much power was in them,
and so the doctrine of mutual assured destruction was formed
acronym MAD appropriate. Yeah, and both sides understood that neither
side would ever fire one of these weapons, but it
was the threat of having them in their arsenals that
gave both nations equal footing, and conventional warfare wasn't used either.

(03:20):
There were no guns, no tanks, no bombs. Don't feel
like this fired because, according to the theory of the
ladder of escalation, if there were a smaller shot fired,
the next nation would respond with a bigger shot, and
even bigger and bigger and bigger and so forth until
someone pulled out the big gun or war exactly. Well,
thanks for clearing that up for me. You can better now. Strangely,

(03:42):
I know the Cold War and I feel a little
bit more warm. And if you want to learn even
more about the Cold War, you can read What's Mutual
Shure Destruction and also our article and how Game Feel
Works works dot com for more on this and thousands
of other top beschin is at how stuff works dot com.

(04:02):
Let us know what you think. Send an email to
podcast head how stuff works dot com. M