Mutually Assured Destruction - MAD

Big race to creating the best nuclear weapon between Soviet Union and USA. The Soviets were matching the USA weapon for weapon.

Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) is a doctrine of military strategy in which a full-scale use of nuclear weapons by two opposing sides would effectively result in the destruction of both the attacker and the defender. MAD's premise was that was could be avoided be the certainty that both side would be annihilated in a nuclear exchange.

Eisenhower had second thoughts regarding MAD, he proposed instead, as a start, an arms limitation agreement with the Soviet Union.

The MAD doctrine assumes that each side has enough nuclear weaponry to destroy the other side and that either side, if attacked for any reason by the other, would retaliate with equal or greater force. The expected result is an immediate escalation resulting in both combatants' total and assured destruction. It is now generally hypothesized that the nuclear fallout or nuclear winter resulting from a large scale nuclear war would bring about worldwide devastation, though this was not a critical assumption to the theory of MAD.