A MAD Scenario To Ponder

The Official Substack Of Brandon Richey is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

“I gain nothing by having a rock in my boxing glove if the other fellow has one too." - Sir Denis Nayland Smith”

― Sax Rohmer

For anyone with half a brain, the past few years have caused a lot of concern with the state of the world due to the geopolitical instability and escalation of World War III along with the failing financial institutions, the prospect of nuclear conflict, and with the rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI).

In light of all the recent discoveries by DOGE uncovering all the vast corruption by people that have been put in charge of the country for many years, combined with the fact that these people’s decisions have directly resulted in making the world a more dangerous place, is chilling to think about. I mean the thought that we, as a society, have allowed these nihilists and psychopathic overlords to govern, control, and directly influence the geopolitical landscape is mind blowing to say the least.

It’s during moments like this that we have to look to the past to remove the fog and to gain a sound perspective in order to understand the present so that we can then better navigate the path when looking downrange towards the future.

Speaking of the past, back in 1962 the Cuban missile crisis brought the world to the brink of nuclear annihilation. During this time the U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara had previously promoted a counterforce, or a “no cities” strategy which involved the strategic targeting of Soviet military units and other various installations.

Under this model and line of thinking it was believed that perhaps a nuclear conflict of limited scope could actually be carried out, and even won, without it leading to an all out nuclear exchange resulting in total destruction. Of course, for this strategy to actually work it would rely on both superpowers actually abiding by the rule of such a limited warfighting strategy. However, at the end of the day neither side believed that the other superpower would be willing to adhere to such rules.

So in 1965 McNamara proposed a countervalue doctrine that shifted the focus of targeting onto Soviet cities. In this proposed scenario McNamara pointed out that this doctrine of “assured destruction” could be achieved with as few as 400 high-yield nuclear weapons targeting various Soviet population centers. In terms of a proposed outcome using this approach McNamara estimated that this would be “sufficient to destroy over one-third of [the Soviet] population and one-half of [Soviet] industry.” (Source: Britannica)

With this approach McNamara was pointing out that with this guarantee of mutual annihilation that this strategy would serve as an effective deterrent to both parties. In addition to this he believed that this goal of maintaining destructive parity should guide U.S. defense decisions.

Now even though McNamara proposed this strategy while basing this tenuous equilibrium on the assured-destruction capability of the U.S. arsenal the term mutual assured destruction, or its recognized acronym “MAD” wasn’t actually coined by McNamara himself. Instead that recognized phrase was coined by an opponent to McNamara’s doctrine and his name was Donald Brennan.

Brennan proposed that trying to preserve an indefinite stalemate would end up doing very little to secure U.S. defense long term. In Brennan’s view such a strategy wasn’t the best option given the fact