As others have said - the primary reason is that you need 1+ nukes to take out the other side's launch sites, and the other side knows this so they spread the siloses across their whole territory - so now you need 1+ nukes for every silo they have (or suspect they have), and they need 1+ nukes for every silo you have (or suspect you have), and this is a positive feedback loop.

i don't see any real reasons, i bet lunch the main idea was to be able to credibly publish a bar graph showing your count larger than that of your enemies.

> Any money is in selling bombs that are used, so you can sell more. Not much money in nukes

World nuclear arms spending hit $73bn last year – half of it by US.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/13/nuclear-weapon...

"The U.S. government is now estimated to have 6,800 nuclear weapons at its disposal, but America hasn’t actually built a new warhead or bomb since the 1990s. “It has refurbished several types in recent years to extend their lifetime,”...The B61-12 atomic bombs, for instance, are to undergo a life-extension program that will cost roughly $9.5 billion. There are 400 to 500 of these bombs... which means refurbishing one will cost about $20 million.

W-80 warheads, another type being refurbished, are estimated to cost $75 million each ... the total cost of the W-80 life extension plan will be $7.3 billion to $9.9 billion over 17 years."

https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/08/heres-how-much-a-nuclear-wea...

Sounds like serious money to me. More details about which companies are making the most money and how:

http://www.nuclearweaponsmoney.org/corporations/

https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2020/01/02/20-companies...

Thank you, am reading his Strategy in the Missile Age, which is surprisingly a very enjoyable read. Brodie was evidently a cultured guy and a good writer. There's quite a bit of history and philosophy, and the first 2 pages are entirely about Paradise Lost!

PDF: https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/commercial_books/...

Thanks this is much more elegant than what I came up with.

Stalin was (justifiably) frightened by nuclear weapons. Any time between August 1945 and mid-1949, Truman could have picked up the phone and said "we've decided to step back from the brink". Stalin would have eagerly agreed. Instead, USA developed vastly more destructive fusion weapons, and the first unofficial act of newly created CIA intentionally leaked designs to the Russians. That's why their first functional weapon was a carbon copy of early American weapons.

Truman would later regret creating one of the several monsters that ate his soul [0], but he was clearly out of his depth from the moment that he learned of atomic weapons. None of the top military brass wanted to use the atomic bomb. [1] The reptiles knew what they were doing in 1944 when they replaced Henry Wallace with an easily controlled Missouri hick. Truman himself didn't know their precise plans, but he had to know he wasn't the man who should've gotten that job. He let ambition overrule propriety.

Of course, Truman isn't the only human to blame for the mess we've been in for 75 years. Most of the scientists who developed the bomb knew better than he did what the result would be. "MAD" is not an acceptable condition for human life. We endure it because some reptiles desired further enrichment. No good intentions paved their way to their current location.

Throughout our existence, USA's projections of the worst possible intentions on the part of other nations have driven our deepest depravities, to a far greater extent than the real situations we've faced.

[0] https://truthout.org/articles/trumans-true-warning-on-the-ci...

[1] https://www.thenation.com/article/world/why-the-us-really-bo...

Yes, MADness. Because the attack entails utter destruction, it would be irrational to attack, so no one attacks.

Bernard Brodie, naval strategist, figured this all out as the inevitable endpoint of nuclear weapons in 1946.

People have been trying to get around it ever since, but there is no way around it. Disarm, and a handful of nukes rule the world. If armed, the only way to avoid war is to make it utterly irrational.

And offence has an apparently permanent advantage over defence with MIRVs, as it will cost more to shoot down a rocket than to launch it, so missile defence doesn’t work as a strategy to exit MAD.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Brodie_(military_str...

Not necessarily. I think the nuclear winder risk for an asymmetrical strike is largely overblown. If a country successfully take the capability of the other to respond, they could see few repercussions.

This drives the need to be able to respond.

The US in fact did have a serious problem with nuclear warplan targeting during the Cold War - there was essentially never a reason you could give to take a target off the list, so the plan for a good deal of time was essentially something like "hit every single conceivable target several times" (to account for failed bombs or losses en route).

It was actually one of Dick Cheney's initiatives to create a process which would remove targets from the nuclear warplan's to get the number of weapons used down to a manageable number - and end the feedback of "oh no we've assigned all the weapons - we need more weapons in case there's more targets".

EDIT: A critical element with nuclear warplan's is that you don't have one bomb per target - you generally have several bombs per target via different delivery systems with different priorities, because the key element of MAD is survivability - there has to always be a guarantee in your adversary's mind that they cannot destroy enough capability to create a winning scenario for them.

Of course they would be. Nuking the USSR would involve resigning yourself to the murder of hundreds of millions. It also means accepting that the USSR will do whatever they can to retaliate with nukes.

In that context, you are already so resigned at killing others over your own safety, that hitting a few other countries is a no-brainer.

And the USSR was willing to nuke everything from Turkey to South Korea (going the long way).

Yes, that was the stated objective.

It's not generally known, particularly by the generation that was born at the tail end of the Cold War (like myself), and by people born later. We grew up without the fear of that particular flavor of Armageddon.

But MAD is still what keeps the world relatively peaceful. It also gives rise to certain paradoxes - like any attempt to create a better defense against nuclear weapons is also the biggest threat to mankind, because it risks breaking the MAD doctrine and thus inviting a nuclear first strike. For MAD to work, countries in their equivalence class (e.g. US, Russia and China are one class) need to be in lock step with their capabilities, so that no one can be struck without the attacker risking annihilation.

I'd say it's generally known - everyone is aware of nukes and what nukes can do. The difference is they're considered much more of a known quantity these days: you can't use them, you don't use them, and you also can't fight a direct war with any country which has them. The idea of the "mad Russians" launching against the US has worn out, but watch what happens when you talk about Iran or North Korea having them.

What's more worrying is that most nuclear policy in the US was centered around condensing launch authority solely with the President of the United States - there's a heck of a lot of assumption that that person is a sane, rational elder statesmen type.

The obvious - but incredibly difficult to implement - solution is to achieve world peace, through mutual respect, tolerance and trust amongst nations. A lot of people seem to have abandoned that as a goal, in favor of being contented with a perpetual uneasy standoff.

It's a tough goal - perhaps the hardest there has ever been - but it's not impossible.

The problem with MAD is that it only works with logical people. Once you include religious fanatics then they don't fear the destruction, in their warped sense of reality their death just takes them to the next spiritual level (or whatever claptrap they preach). So they dont care if they are destroyed as long as their enemy is destroyed also. Because their enemy is some sort of heretic/unbeliever they will not be saved, whilst their people will all live happily in heaven because their god excuses genocide if you do it in HIS name.