[organicmultiloc]

The problem is not everyone on the world stage is a rational game theory nerd that links to papers like we want them to be. Also 60 years of treating every other country as a box in a threat model to be manipulated against other boxes has been a completely unmitigated disaster, so maybe we should stop that.

[ams6110]

> 60 years of treating every other country as a box in a threat model to be manipulated against other boxes has been a completely unmitigated disaster

Has it? The last 60 years have been relatively peaceful, by historical standards.

[masswerk]

You want to ask all those who lost their lives in any of the numerous conflicts. Only, because the big clash didn't happen (it nearly happened three times in 1983), this doesn't mean that there weren't any conflicts. E.g., the biggest air war in history, in Laos, even was conducted in secrecy, African politics is just a single mess, etc.

[Cthulhu_]

The world also became a lot more connected, so we're exposed a lot more to wars and such abroad, and we've matured morally speaking and can see that all wars are unnecessary.

[vertexFarm]

For all the evidence we have, MAD has worked. Still here. Still no WWIII. At the beginning of the twentieth century it was looking like we'd have another world war every twenty years or so for the rest of time.

As best we can tell, nukes actually did end large-scale war. I would call that at least a partially mitigated disaster.

[projectileboy]

You're not wrong, but there were multiple incidents during the cold war where the US and Soviet Union came very, very, very close to a nuclear exchange, and it was only dumb luck (and sometimes the heroic actions of individuals who were in the right place at the right time) that saved us. We were lucky, and luck is not a plan.

[burfog]

I think that weapons range, combined with either precision targeting or large numbers, gets that job done. Picture a world without nukes, but with lots of highly accurate ICBMs and SLBMs. The attacker can expect to be attacked, with the destruction being stuff like the Kremlin or Whitehouse or parliament building.

In the days of WWII, an attacker could rightly feel confident that there could not be an immediate response that strikes anything of importance. The attacker might even believe that such a response could not be possible ever in the future. Poland could be invaded without any realistic worry that Berlin would be attacked that same day, and a bit of optimism turns that into Berlin being safe.

[fjsolwmv]

I don't see how that argument is justified. Maybe the Marshall Plan and the European Community saved Europe from war. Maybe Maybe globalization and general civilization-wide wealth creation made it so the elite's and xommonners businesses are less profitable in large scale war. (Note that even today, wars happen in poor countries, not rich countries). Maybe democratic evolution made the "send peasants to war" model obselete, and maybe modern communication made it harder to sell the fascist lies that motivated WWII. Nuclear Weapons didn't prevent Vietnam or Korea or the Middle East wars.

[forapurpose]

While my humble opinion is that MAD was effective, let's be careful not to infer causation from a sequence of events (the rooster crows and then the sun rises). And the events of 'MAD' and 'peace' are not in sequence: WWII ended in 1945. MAD wasn't an idea until the 1960s and not implemented in a treaty until the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, AFAICT.[0]

It makes more sense if you remember that nuclear weapons and delivery technology didn't reach the 'assured destruction' stage for awhile. Remember that in the Korean War, in the 1950s, General MacArthur was pushing to use nuclear weapons (IIRC); it wasn't as taboo then. Finally, remember that MAD applied only to the Soviet Union and U.S. (or the Warsaw Pact and NATO), while major international wars ended worldwide, for the most part. Remember that WWI and WWII were fought between future NATO members; the later peace between them wasn't due to MAD.

> At the beginning of the twentieth century it was looking like we'd have another world war every twenty years or so for the rest of time.

The victors of WWII were very concerned about that, and began planning to prevent it before the war ended. That resulted in the UN, the institutions that became the EU, a rejection of nationalism (as a significant cause of war), the spread of democracy and universal human rights as a peace-making policy (democracies generally don't start wars with each other), and U.S. leadership in the international order to maintain those things and to provide stability. My understanding is that those are the reasons for the relative but extraordinary peace. Here's a Churchill speech about it in Zurich in 1946 (the speech focuses on the future EU; remember he also was one of the architects of the United Nations):

http://www.churchill-society-london.org.uk/astonish.html

(I'll also note that they seemed to have worked so well that now people take the peace for granted and are tossing aside the things that make it happen.)

[0] The best credible source I can find quickly. If you hit a paywall, access it via a search engine: https://www.britannica.com/topic/nuclear-strategy#ref1224926

EDIT: Added a detail

[7952]

Do we really have enough data to draw conclusions? A nuclear war could break out in ten years time and be orders of magnitude worse than WWII. That would invalidate MAD in an instant.

Nuclear weapons create a requirement that you safety depends on the pragmatism and sanity of leaders and government. Not only of your own country but your enemies.