If you live in Manhattan or Washington DC today, you basically can assume you will be nuked first, yet people live their lives. Granted people could behave differently under this scenario for non-logical reasons.
My understanding is that in the Cold War, a basic MAD assumption was that if anyone were going to launch a first strike, they’d try to do so with overwhelming force sufficient to prevent a second strike, hitting everything at once.
If you can strike in a way that prevents retaliation that would, by definition, not be mutually assured destruction. Your understanding is also wrong, at least for most of the cold war. Nuclear submarines make it impossible to strike so hard they can’t fire back, and they have been around since 1960. People in the cold war were very much afraid of living in a potential target area, but life went on.
If you can strike in a way that prevents retaliation that would, by definition, not be mutually assured destruction.
Correct, which is in part why so much effort went into developing credible second strike capabilities, building up all parts of the nuclear triad, and closing the supposed missile gap. Because both the US and USSR had sufficiently credible second strike capabilities, it made a first strike much less strategically attractive and reduced the likelihood of one occurring. I’m not sure how your comment disagrees with mine? I see them as two sides of the same coin.
My understanding is that in the Cold War, a basic MAD assumption was that if anyone were going to launch a first strike, they’d try to do so with overwhelming force sufficient to prevent a second strike, hitting everything at once.
If you can strike in a way that prevents retaliation that would, by definition, not be mutually assured destruction. Your understanding is also wrong, at least for most of the cold war. Nuclear submarines make it impossible to strike so hard they can’t fire back, and they have been around since 1960. People in the cold war were very much afraid of living in a potential target area, but life went on.
Correct, which is in part why so much effort went into developing credible second strike capabilities, building up all parts of the nuclear triad, and closing the supposed missile gap. Because both the US and USSR had sufficiently credible second strike capabilities, it made a first strike much less strategically attractive and reduced the likelihood of one occurring. I’m not sure how your comment disagrees with mine? I see them as two sides of the same coin.