Wow, that is positively horrifying. It just stuns me to think that we, collectively speaking, have equivalent of three billion tons of TNT theoretically aimed at population centers all over the globe. It's like a push-button holocaust that would make the Nazis look like amateurs. To think that a crisis over anything on this planet could justify such an escalation does not make sense to me. Like I said before, I don't really understand how MAD makes us safer; I get the idea that if we just make war so terrifically horrible enough nobody will wage war anymore, but that logic does not feel convincing or comforting given human history. It seems like there are people out there who would let the world burn if it would make them king of the ashes afterwards. That was an interesting link about Dead Hand as well, seems like even some Russians got a little nervous about too much automation. I guess you have to trust that groups with nuclear weapons are rational actors, because without that caveat, MAD goes from borderline nonsensical, to downright batshit insane.
Thing about the Nazis - they weren't interested in wiping out everyone, the were interested in wiping out everyone genetically inferior that happened to have resources they wanted. And that's the big hangup with nuclear weapons as "weapons" - they aren't selective, and they're pretty much area denial weapons. It's like Rome V. Carthage - you don't salt the soil if you plan on using it. The nice thing about MAD is we never really tested it. Did it work? Obviously! We're still here! Or was that something else? Obviously! "Mad" is in the title! Are you crazy? I'll say this - there isn't much evidence that any of the ideologically-driven organizations have ever pursued nukes. Iran is interested in nukes because, as their minister of defense pointed out, the United States has made exactly zero overtures of hostility towards the one country on the "axis of evil" with nukes. To the best of my knowledge, and to the best of my reading, there have been no credible examples of any terrorist organizations (other than Aum Shinrikyo) attempting to acquire or develop nuclear weapons. Even the most radical of islamist freakballs can't assume that the entire blast radius of a nuclear weapon is chockablock with nothing but infidels and kaffirs. Perimeter was driven more by a Soviet belief that the Americans were crazy more than anything else... and the fact that it would have taken the Soviets something like six hours to trigger a nuclear response. So... rational, in its own way. And I'll also point this out: Not even MacArthur wanted to use nukes and back then, the Soviets had mmmmmmmmmmmmaybe one nuke, and it wouldn't have been "mutually assured destruction" by any stretch of the imagination. Realistically speaking? Large-scale weapons (and weapons systems) are an economic and jobs project. Swords cost. Plowshares are more useful... but you know how many schools you need to build. You know how many roads you need? Strategic bombers? Well... can you ever truly have enough? Are you sure? (Do you hate freedom?)
Right, so the Nazi's used genetics as an excuse to wipe out millions, confiscating wealth and property in the process, certainly terrible to be sure, and in a theoretical US v. Russia full scale nuclear war, politics would be used as an excuse to wipe out millions, perhaps stemming from a crisis or disagreement over some resource, leaving a horribly stunted future for people all around the globe to endure for generations to come. It's hard to compare horrific tragedies like that but I think calling such a scenario a nuclear holocaust would be a very fitting term. I mean, in theory, if we're shooting nukes over there, we aren't interested in killing everyone, just the people who happen to live over there, right!? That is a good point, MAD hasn't failed so far, so that is a feather in its cap. Given that the nuclear weapon technology is already out there, we can't exactly just un-invent it, and I suppose perhaps the threat of a nuclear holocaust does discourage casual use of the technology. It sounds like from the MacArthur and Truman exchanges, when they were first developed, we didn't really have a good idea of how to treat them, or what to do with them, other than simply regard them as just really big bombs. Obviously now, they're revered as a kind of symbolic force which I can see as being better and safer for everyone. And point taken about military spending; it's a bipartisan money funnel with no bottom, held in place by some very powerful people who really seem to love that "freedom."
My discomfort with the use of Nazis in this discussion is the motives are different. The Nazis wanted "lebensraum." A nuclear holocaust is kind of the opposite of that. "Holocaust" is a term used regularly in discussing nuclear warfare, minus the Nazis; I think this is because the Nazis were so goddamn methodical about it while nuclear armageddon is pretty much a game of 52 pickup. Evil is as evil does and both moves are unspeakably evil, but at least the Nazis were evil and practical. "Hard to make a lampshade out of ashes," he said grimly. And the theory about limited death kinda went out the door the minute we had ICBMs. I'm not sure when, exactly, arsenals expanded to the point where total ecosystem destruction was a probability, but I reckon it was back in the '60s. Nobody seriously thought anyone would survive a negative outcome of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Which is an argument for MAD, crazy as it is. I'm going to guess you're younger than me.