Mutually Assured Destruction

According to wikipedia.org, MAD "is the doctrine of military strategy in which a full scale use of nuclear weapons by one of two opposing sides would result in the destruction of both the attacker and the defender. It is based on the theory of deterrence according to which the deployment of strong weapons is essential to threaten the enemy in order to prevent the use of the very same weapons." This doctrine assumes that each side has atleast equal firepower, and that the attacked side will respond with as great or greater force to an attack using strong weapons. It also assumes that neither side would dare to launch a pre-emptive strike, because the opposing side will surely respond in kind, and therefore both sides would be destroyed. The paradox of MAD is that both sides must invest in a massive amount, and in fact, an ever-increasing amount, of nuclear weapons, so that they might ensure that they have the same amount or more firepower than their opponent. I do not totally understand this, so I am not going to paraphrase, but instead copy the text of wikipedia.org for your perusal:

"...The strategy of mutually assured destruction was first fully described [in the 1960s], largely by United States Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara.

In McNamara's formulation, MAD meant that nuclear nations either had first strike or second strike capability. A nation with first strike capability would be able to destroy the entire nuclear arsenal of another nation and thus prevent any nuclear retaliation. Second strike capability indicated that a nation could promise to respond to a nuclear attack with enough force to make such a first attack highly undesirable. According to McNamara, the Arms Race was in part an attempt to make sure that no nation gained first strike capability...."

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