Towards the world of MAD

The crisis was over, but its seriousness and potential consequences demanded, on both sides, a reassessment of the entire strategic situation. For the remainder of the 1960s two aspects of this reassessment were particularly evident.

mutually assured destruction (MAD)

An American doctrine of reciprocal deterrence resting on the United States and Soviet Union each being able to inflict unacceptable damage on the other in retaliation for a nuclear attack.

The shock of the Cuban Missile Crisis clearly made Soviet and American leaders more aware that an accidental nuclear war was a serious possibility and required, at the minimum, improved channels of communication between the two sides. Therefore, in 1963 they set up a ‘hot line', a direct communications link between the Soviet and American capitals. Several months later, the Soviet Union, United States and Britain agreed to a Limited Test Ban Treaty that ended atmospheric tests; future nuclear tests would be conducted underground. These limited steps were coupled, however, with a series of seemingly contradictory moves and public statements.

Limited Test Ban Treaty An agreement signed by Britain, the Soviet Union and the United States in 1963, committing nations to halt atmospheric tests of nuclear weapons: by the end of 1963, ninety-six additional nations had signed the treaty.

Such statements have contributed significantly to the debate about what Kennedy might have sought to achieve had he not been killed on 22 November 1963. Would he have worked tirelessly towards improving Soviet-American relations? Would he, perhaps, have refused to dispatch American troops to Vietnam, hence avoiding another major point of contention between Moscow and Washington? Whatever the answers are to such questions, the fact of the matter remains that Kennedy's policy towards the Soviet Union after the Cuban Missile Crisis was ambivalent. He was certainly not willing to concede defeat, or risk the appearance of defeat, vis-à-vis the USSR in any field.

On the Soviet side, Nikita Khrushchev retained the reins of leadership only slightly longer than Kennedy did.

By the second half of the 1960s it was evident that the continued nuclear buildup on both sides had created a grim situation. As both sides amassed nuclear weapons and increased their destructive capabilities, the prospect of a nuclear war — given its consequences — at the same time became increasingly unthinkable. Hence, many strategists were convinced that the only way of avoiding nuclear war was to rely on the deterring effects of MAD. MAD represented, in fact, a curious shift in military thinking. The Americans, for example, had previously considered superiority as the best deterrent to a Soviet nuclear attack, but they now believed that only a balance of terror — the ability of both the United States and the Soviet Union to survive a first strike and launch a massive retaliatory strike in response — could prevent a nuclear exchange.

There was an additional irony in the emerging world of MAD, for while warheads and missiles were piled up and research was undertaken into new weapons systems, nuclear arms seemed to be losing their practicality. On the one hand, the major purpose of the arms race from the 1960s onwards seemed to be to ensure that a nuclear war would not begin. On the other hand, the growing nuclear arsenals of the United States and the Soviet Union seemed to give them little additional political power, save some incalculable degree of additional ‘prestige’ vis-à-vis the rest of the world.

It was within the context of MAD, proliferation and the seeming waste of resources that the continued buildup represented, that the American and Soviet leaders began to warm towards the idea of some sort of agreement that would limit the expansion of their respective arsenals. In June 1967, during a meeting in Glassboro, New Jersey, between the Soviet premier, Alexei Kosygin, and President Johnson, the two sides began to exchange preliminary views about a possible treaty limiting the size of each other’s strategic nuclear stockpiles. By then, however, a number of other developments in the Eastern and Western blocs were already indicating that detente was more than wishful thinking.