On April 12, Emma Ashford and Matthew Kroenig participated in a Foreign Policy debate over whether Russia would use nuclear weapons, which was also featured in Politico.
“I think one of the Cold War lessons we absolutely need to take is Ronald Reagan’s famous dictum that a nuclear war cannot be won and should never be fought. The problem, of course, is that everybody agrees on that, but people disagree pretty strongly on how to avoid having to fight that war in the first place. There’s a couple of models: the one that I favor…is mutually assured destruction. MAD is…both sides in a nuclear relationship have a secure second strike capability: that is to say that even after nuclear weapons start flying, they maintain the ability to strike back at the other side. Throughout much of the Cold War, MAD helped to assure that neither side felt that they could benefit from starting a nuclear war,” Ashford argued.
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