The principle behind MAD, mutually assured destruction, is that each side must believe that if they launch a nuclear attack, the other side will retaliate and both sides will be obliterated. Whether that scenario has prevented a world war since WWII is up for debate, but I think most people have generally bought into the idea that the presence of nuclear weapons has been a useful deterrence. Daniel Ellsberg's second volume of his memoirs discusses the truly mind-boggling discussions held at the RAND Corporation during the fifties, sixties and seventies, on how, why, and when nuclear weapons should be used.* Ellsberg notes the debate is not so clearcut:
“The declared official rationale for such a system,” Ellsberg writes, “has always been primarily the supposed need to deter—or if necessary respond to—an aggressive Russian nuclear first strike against the United States. That widely believed public rationale is a deliberate deception. Deterring a surprise Soviet nuclear attack—or responding to such an attack—has never been the only or even the primary purpose of our nuclear plans and preparations. The nature, scale, and posture of our strategic nuclear forces has always been shaped by the requirements of quite different purposes: to attempt to limit the damage to the United States from Soviet or Russian retaliation to a U.S. first strike against the USSR or Russia. This capability is, in particular, intended to strengthen the credibility of U.S. threats to initiate limited nuclear attacks, or escalate them—U.S. threats of ‘first use’—to prevail in regional, initially non-nuclear conflicts involving Soviet or Russian forces or their allies.”
Some of the stunning revelations are that the assumptions made behind these calculations may have been completely false. While we were assuming the offensive intent of the Soviets and that they had thousands of missiles, in reality they were obsessed with defense and had only four(!) ICBMs, all clustered at one location and liquid fueled, which meant it took quite a while to fire them up. Riven by bureaucratic envy and power struggles, the discussions and decisions promulgated in their reports often were influenced more by loyalty to one service or another rather than any rational view of nuclear weapons use.
Discussions of Trump's mental instability lead inevitably to concerns about the accidental use of nuclear weapons that would be ruinous. Apparently the "my button is bigger than your button" threat is not new if less scatological. [Trump seems to have the not atypical obsession with genitalia size but most men aren't quite so public in their concerns.) It was used by other presidents in efforts to manipulate other countries. Nixon also used the threat of nuclear weapons as has Trump.
Another interesting observation Ellsberg makes is that the truism that "everything leaks in Washington is just not true." There are so many categories of super-secret documents and information that we only learn about decades later, often thanks to people like Ellsberg who were in a position to work with and know the material.
His time at RAND was an intellectual paradise. There was an enormous mental energy with lots of "hands-off debate." But, Ellsberg has concluded that looking back over sixty years that if security were the goal then they were wrong all the time. They were all, knowing the facts, willing to risk a one in chance risk of nuclear war that they knew would kill hundreds of millions.
And accidents and unforeseen events happen. We have learned from McNamara's autobiography, In Retrospect,** that Kennedy and the U.S. military had the wrong information. The Soviets had 42,000 men in Cuba, not 7,000. They also did not know that there were hundreds of tactical nuclear weapons that Cuban officers had been authorized to use had the U.S. invaded. If another American reconnaissance plane had been shot at or Cuba had been invaded by U.S. military, or if Soviet submarines had decided to retaliate with nuclear weapons after being attacked by U.S. warships with practice depth charges (the Soviets didn't know they were not real.)
We came very, very close. And now our "very stable genius" has called for the production of more nukes.
BTW. If you have not yet seen The Post, Spielberg's exceptional movie about the Washington Post's decision to publish the Pentagon Papers after the injunction against the New York Times, run and go see it. Amazing performances by Hanks and Streep. If you want more information about Ellsberg and his role, see https://www.haaretz.com/us-news/.premium-1.834573
*The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner by Daniel Ellsberg
**https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/37580670?book_show_action=false&from_review_page=1
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