Talk:Mutual assured destruction

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The topic of the article is "Mutual assured destruction", which is "a doctrine of military strategy and national security policy" said to be a possible preventer of war. Wikiquote has articles on related topics such as Global catastrophic risk, Nuclear war, Nuclear war, all of which have been targeted by the sock team to promote the claim that we are all going to die in a nuclear fireball if the US doesn't let Putin win in Ukraine.[1][2][3] The danger of weapons to human life is important, but it is not the topic of this particular article. HouseOfChange (talk) 19:03, 26 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Images and text removed on April 19[edit]

Here are images and text I removed with this edit. The topic of this article is not "the threat of nuclear war," nor is it Russia v Ukraine. Update, I restored the part in italics of a quote from w:John Scales Avery. If I had known he was "notable" I would have tried to find a quotable part of the longer passage to keep in the first place. HouseOfChange (talk) 19:39, 26 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]


The paradox of nuclear weapons is that the most powerful weapons ever created have no practical value as actual weapons of war, since there can be no winner in a war that kills everybody. ~ Medea Benjamin
Today, every inhabitant of this planet must contemplate the day when this planet may no longer be habitable. Every man, woman and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles...capable of being cut at any moment by accident, or miscalculation, or by madness. ~ John F. Kennedy
It is no longer a choice between violence and non-violence; it is either non-violence or non-existence. The alternative to disarmament...may well be a civilization plunged into the abyss of annihilation. ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.
  • There is a danger that our world, with all the beauty and value that it contains, will be destroyed by this cynical game for power and money, in which civilians are militarism's hostages.
    Nations possessing nuclear weapons threaten each other with “Mutually Assured Destruction”, which has the very appropriate acronym MAD. What does this mean? Does it mean that civilians are being protected? Not at all. Instead they are threatened with complete destruction. Civilians here play the role of hostages in the power games of their leaders.
    A thermonuclear war today would be not only genocidal but also omnicidal. It would kill people of all ages, babies, children, young people, mothers, fathers and grandparents, without any regard whatever for guilt or innocence. Such a war would be the ultimate ecological catastrophe, destroying not only human civilization but also much of the biosphere. There is much worry today about climate change, but an ecological catastrophe of equal or greater magnitude could be produced by a nuclear war.
  • What is the only provocation that could bring about the use of nuclear weapons? Nuclear weapons. What is the priority target for nuclear weapons? Nuclear weapons. What is the only established defense against nuclear weapons? Nuclear weapons. How do we prevent the use of nuclear weapons? By threatening the use of nuclear weapons. And we can't get rid of nuclear weapons, because of nuclear weapons. The intransigence, it seems, is a function of the weapons themselves.
    • Martin Amis, Einstein's Monsters (1987), "Introduction: Thinkability"
  • In 1954, the United States tested a hydrogen bomb at Bikini. The bomb was 1,300 times more powerful than the bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki... Even today, more than half a century later, both people and animals on Rongelap and other nearby islands suffer from birth defects. The most common defects have been “jelly fish babies”, born with no bones and with transparent skin. Their brains and beating hearts can be seen. The babies usually live a day or two before they stop breathing... We have to remember that the total explosive power of the nuclear weapons in the world today is 500,0000 times as great as the power of the bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. What is threatened by a nuclear war today is the complete breakdown of human civilization.
  • Besides spreading deadly radioactivity throughout the world, a nuclear war would inflict catastrophic damage on global agriculture. Firestorms in burning cities would produce many millions of tons of black, thick, radioactive smoke. The smoke would rise to the stratosphere where it would spread around the earth and remain for a decade. Prolonged cold, decreased sunlight and rainfall, and massive increases in harmful ultraviolet light would shorten or eliminate growing seasons, producing a nuclear famine. Even a small nuclear war could endanger the lives of the billion people who today are chronically undernourished. A full-scale war fought with hydrogen bombs would mean that most humans would die from hunger. Many animal and plant species would also be threatened with extinction.
  • The Times (New York Times magazine) misleadingly points to “the threat” hypersonics pose to “retaliatory weapons,” which could “upend the grim psychology of Mutual Assured Destruction,” without once noting that destabilizing US ballistic missile defense systems deployed near Russian and Chinese borders are already doing just that, with Russia and China pursuing hypersonic nukes capable of penetrating US missile defenses precisely to restore the balance of Mutual Assured Destruction.
    Nor did the Times quote statements from Russian and Chinese officials warning that US missile defense expansion will “inevitably lead” to an “arms race in space” with “the most negative consequences” for “international security and stability,” and their desire to avoid an arms race because the US already has a military budget much larger than Russia’s and China’s combined. This is consistent with FAIR’s findings (Extra!, 5/01) of corporate media ignoring the US’s long-term goal of weaponizing and dominating outer space under the pretense of expanding missile defense systems.... However, the most glaring omission in the Times’ coverage of the arms race—in keeping with its cover for US missile defense expansion—was its failure to ever mention the US plans to unilaterally scuttle the crucial 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty banning US and Russian medium-range missile arsenals, despite Russian attempts to save it (Al-Jazeera, 1/17/19). That Russia is developing mid-range hypersonic nuclear weapons in response to US suspension of the INF treaty would be an important thing to mention.
  • They told Gorbachev, ‘We promise if you agree to a reunited Germany in NATO, NATO will not move—this was Secretary of State James Baker—one inch to the east. In other words, NATO would not move from Germany toward Russia. And it did... As we speak today, NATO is on Russia’s borders... The ABM (Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty), by prohibiting wide deployment of anti-missile defense installments... had long guaranteed equal security based on the underlying principles of MAD {Mutual Assured Destruction] and parity. Bush’s abolition of the treaty in effect nullified those principles and signified Washington’s quest for nuclear superiority over Russia... Putin went to Texas. He had a barbecue with Bush, second Bush. Bush said he ‘looked into his eyes and saw a good soul.’ There was this honeymoon. Why did they turn against Putin?
  • Trump comes out of nowhere in 2016 and says, ‘I think we should cooperate with Russia,’...This is a statement of détente...It’s then that this talk of Trump being an agent of the Kremlin begins.... What do you end up with today? Betrayal. Any kind of discussion about Russian-American relations today, an informed Russian is going to say, ‘We worry you will betray us again.’… Putin said he had illusions about the West when he came to power....
  • Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, hailed as a virtual superhero in Western media, has vacillated between openness to negotiating a peace settlement with Russia and calling for NATO to “close the skies” above Ukraine. To save his country he appears willing to risk endangering the entire world.
    • Pentagon Drops Truth Bombs to Stave Off War With Russia, Joe Lauria, Consortium News, March 23, 2022
  • Do you realize that if Ukraine joins NATO and decides to take Crimea back through military means, the European countries will automatically get drawn into a military conflict with Russia? Of course, NATO’s united potential and that of Russia are incomparable. We understand that, but we also understand that Russia is one of the world’s leading nuclear powers, and is superior to many of those countries in terms of the number of modern nuclear force components. But there will be no winners (in a nuclear war)... Of course... I do not want it (a nuclear war)... For our (Russia's) part, we will do our best to find compromises that suit everyone. There is not a single point that we consider unachievable in the proposals we sent to NATO and Washington.
  • It would be completely MAD to go to war with Russia — that is, it would be an invitation for the world to finally learn the true meaning of the acronym that used to be as commonly used as acronyms like SALT, START, or ICBM — Mutually Assured Destruction. But in our corporate and so-called public media landscape today, in the media consumed daily by so many millions of Americans (not to mention people in the UK, Australia, and many other countries in similar straits), there will be no reminders of this critical concept, which was once known as a doctrine, one that was dominant in the halls of power in both Washington, DC and Moscow for much of the twentieth century.... Up until President Biden’s recent, singular press conference, it seemed there was some awareness of the concept in the mind of the commander-in-chief, at least. He did threaten all kinds of economic sanctions — which can themselves be considered acts of war, depending on the particulars...
  • As I observe our propaganda machine go into war-fever overdrive, I try to imagine what it must be like to be one of these relatively young, aspiring reporters for NPR, given one retired State Department official after another to interview for another three-minute segment, in which there’s no time to get beyond the softball questions, even if they might have the flexibility to go off-script for a moment. I can only imagine what it must be like to try to do journalism under such restrictive conditions. What impresses me the most about our propaganda, though, is the extent to which so many of those involved with disseminating it seem to believe it themselves....And as I see the war fever being thus systematically whipped up by the publishers-that-be, I think of the other times I witnessed this phenomenon set in. The difference this time is only that the stakes are so much higher — namely, the continuation of life as we have come to know it.

And the see also section[edit]

Here is the original see also section, which I trimmed in the same edit on April 19:

See also[edit]

The socks use See also for editorial comments (Insanity, Corruption) and to point at articles they heavily edit (Propaganda, 2021–2022 Russo-Ukrainian crisis). I trimmed the list to Arms control, Global catastrophic risk, and Nuclear war. Improvements by others are welcome. `HouseOfChange (talk)

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