Power and MADness: The Logic of Nuclear Coercion

ISBN: 0231068212

Author: Rhodes, Edward

Condition: New

In Power and MADness, Edward Rhodes argues that the United States has fundamentally misunderstood why its nuclear forces deter and what makes nuclear threats credible. Without intending it, the United States has created a nuclear arsenal, command-and-control structure, and decision-making process that threaten to place nuclear decisions beyond rational control during a Soviet-American conflict. Rhodes refines and expands the classical model of nuclear deterrence. He reasons that nuclear deterrent power need not - and in an era of mutual vulnerability, does not - rest on the existence of options for rationally waging nuclear war. This mutual vulnerability in the U.S.-Soviet relationship, which stems from the existence of capabilities for Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD), threatens to make the actual execution of nuclear threats quite mad, at least for a state that values its own survival.