Mutually Assured Destruction: Cold War origins of nuclear Armageddon
This article originally appeared in History of War magazine issue 138.
From the earliest days of the Cold War, both the US and the USSR had nuclear weapons, but only one means of delivering a strike – long-range, strategic bombers. As the conflict wore on, technological advances changed that, and soon the two sides were capable of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD).
"The phrase was first coined by the US Secretary of State Robert McNamara in the early 1960s," historian and author Roger Hermiston told History of War.