"When you look at other countries that are developing the capabilities and the technology to deploy missiles of very significant destructive capability with nuclear, chemical, or biological warheads, then the MAD dogma makes even less sense"
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Nickles is taking a Cold War concept that once felt grimly coherent and making it sound like a relic of bureaucratic complacency. By calling Mutually Assured Destruction a "dogma", he frames MAD not as strategy but as faith: something recited long after its conditions have changed. The rhetorical move is slyly moral and practical at once. If MAD is a dogma, then questioning it becomes common sense rather than hawkish escalation.
The sentence is engineered to widen the threat aperture. It starts with "other countries", an elastic phrase that invites the listener to supply their own villains, then stacks "missiles" with "nuclear, chemical, or biological" like a triptych of dread. That accumulation does political work: it shifts the conversation away from a stable, bilateral standoff (the U.S. and the Soviet Union, both presumed rational and deterrable) toward a messy world of proliferating actors, uneven command structures, and ambiguous red lines. In that landscape, the old logic of symmetrical terror looks less like deterrence and more like gambling.
The subtext is also a domestic pitch. If MAD no longer "makes sense", then investments in missile defense, counterproliferation, and a more assertive posture can be sold as updates, not departures. Post-Cold War America was searching for a new organizing fear; Nickles supplies one rooted in technology diffusion and the anxiety that rational deterrence doesn’t apply to every regime or faction. The line doesn’t just critique MAD. It tries to retire it, and with it the restraint that MAD implied.
The sentence is engineered to widen the threat aperture. It starts with "other countries", an elastic phrase that invites the listener to supply their own villains, then stacks "missiles" with "nuclear, chemical, or biological" like a triptych of dread. That accumulation does political work: it shifts the conversation away from a stable, bilateral standoff (the U.S. and the Soviet Union, both presumed rational and deterrable) toward a messy world of proliferating actors, uneven command structures, and ambiguous red lines. In that landscape, the old logic of symmetrical terror looks less like deterrence and more like gambling.
The subtext is also a domestic pitch. If MAD no longer "makes sense", then investments in missile defense, counterproliferation, and a more assertive posture can be sold as updates, not departures. Post-Cold War America was searching for a new organizing fear; Nickles supplies one rooted in technology diffusion and the anxiety that rational deterrence doesn’t apply to every regime or faction. The line doesn’t just critique MAD. It tries to retire it, and with it the restraint that MAD implied.
Quote Details
| Topic | War |
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