Mutual assured destruction (MAD) is a doctrine of military strategy and national security policy which posits that a full-scale use of nuclear weapons by an attacker on a nuclear-armed defender with second-strike capabilities would result in the complete annihilation of both the attacker and the defender.[1] It is based on the theory of rational deterrence...
A prominent strain of criticism argues that rational deterrence theory is contradicted by frequent deterrence failures, which may be attributed to misperceptions.[55] Critics have also argued that leaders do not behave in ways that are consistent with the predictions of nuclear deterrence theory.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_assured_destruction
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