MAD does NOT prevent nuclear war.
Mutually Assured Destruction not so MAD after all.
The threat of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD), originally conceptualized during the Cold War (by von Neumann, the Manhattan Project director himself), says that the absolute devastation of nuclear conflict acts as a deterrent among nuclear-armed states. At its core, this concept of MAD rests on the rationality and self-interest of world leaders.
The logic is as follows: If leader A wants to start a nuclear war, then he (mostly a he) knows that leader B will retaliate with his nuclear arsenal. Thus both countries of A and B will be destroyed.
No leader wants their country destroyed, therefore no-one will start a nuclear war. So the theory goes. In other words: the threat of MAD is enough to prevent a nuclear war (or, in Game Theory speak: the Nash Equilibrium is that both sides decide not to start a nuclear war).
But von Neumann’s mathematical model of decision-making (called ‘Game Theory’ as in ‘A Beautiful Mind’, where Russel Crowe plays John Nash who was von Neumann’s student) fails to account for leaders who can only act according to the selfish logic of a sociopathic narcissist.
That is what being rational means for the sociopathic narcissist: if I achieve my personal goals then it is good.
A narcissistic leader may believe that a nuclear war is in fact in his own best interest. He may ensure that his family (or, more likely, just a selected few of them), some friends and his henchmen are safe, and that he will be handed the spoils of war (or a portion thereof depending on the art of the deal he may have made with his opponent).
Imagine such a scenario where a leader, driven by narcissism and unchecked power, believes he could survive or even benefit from a nuclear conflict. It is scary that this is not too difficult to imagine. It may mean that we have been incredibly lucky in the past 80 years, and that we attributed this luck to the threat of Mutually Assured Destruction. Maybe we are running out of luck. 80 years of relative peace in Europe may be coming to an end.
Game Theory requires that game participants act rationally. But this glances over the fact that the rationality of a political leader who truly represents his country and that of a political leader who is only interested in himself, lead down two vastly different paths. With such different perceptions of rationality there is no Nash equilibrium and one may simply start a nuclear war.
If the sociopathic narcissist wins the game whilst everyone else dies, that is simply achieving his objective of winning. That is why sociopathic narcistic political leaders can start wars wherein thousands of young men go out to kill and get killed. That is why cult leaders can get their followers to kill (and kill themselves). It’s no skin of the narc’s nose.
This is not merely theoretical: the 20th century offered numerous examples of dictators and other cult leaders who, we could say, acted against the interests of their own countries/followers or even humanity at large, but who were convinced that they were just, because they were acting in their own personal interest.
It may be clear that I think that it is quite important that voters do not install a sociopathic narcissist as president. Therefore voters must be wary of presidential candidates who display narcissistic characteristics, giving such signals as:
“If I kill someone in clear daylight on Fifth-avenue, I won’t lose a vote”, or
“I stand for Family Values” whilst in fact he fucked a porn-star whilst his wife was having his baby.
Comments like these create cognitive dissonance amongst their devoted followers who then resort to abandoning every last bit of critical thinking and dedicate themselves unquestioningly to their leader.
Voters should be on the look-out for someone making cheap self-aggrandizing claims such as:
“I am very intelligent” without providing any evidence (or even when there is mounting evidence to the contrary) or,
“I know all the best people” but then fires all the people he hired because they were “too stupid”, “too incompetent” or simply “disloyal”, or
who claims to be “very rich”, has gold-plated toilets and comes down a gold-plated staircase to announce his candidacy whilst professing to be a Christian which, I would surmise, in fact is sticking it up Christ’s humble behind.
This last one is a great test to see if devoted evangelists will forsake all their Christian beliefs just to follow him. If that is the case, then he can rightfully claim to be the New Messiah (which Trump briefly did on his own media platform).
Sorry for being rude here, but it is to be clear about what this person is actually doing, and this cannot be done by sugarcoating his actions with polite terms.
Sometimes when someone, like a political or a church-leader, is blatantly rude, hypocritical and ‘pissing his followers in the face’, like many an evangelist pastor and political leader, we put PC and “woke” to the side and express ourselves clearly. Political Correctness and ‘Woke’ may have their place in debates, but they do not rule the discourse in absolute terms.
To be clear: Dictators like Hitler, Stalin, Mao and aspiring dictators such as Trump, and televangelists and other cult-leader piss on their followers so they can ‘demonstrate’ their commitment to their Leader like Abraham had to do for his god.
Back to the imaginary presidential candidate who is showing these signs of sociopathic narcissism.
The narcissist ensnares his followers, who cannot cope with this continuous barrage of cognitive dissonance. Their thought processes get confused:
“I am a good Christian and I love him, therefore he must be a good person, because a good Christian (me) would never love someone who is not a good Christian. He lies and cheats, but that is not possible because he is a good Christian because I love him and I am a good Christian, etc.”
Note that this is not all planned by some superior narcissist's mind, but it is simply a consequence of his unhinged thoughts that happen to find resonance with his followers. He simply makes no sense, but the cognitive dissonance lurking in his followers’ heads comes to his rescue:
“I am a good person and I can think for myself. I think that He is the candidate who is going to save me and America from people who are different from me. I think that because I love him and he said so. He must be very intelligent, else I would not love him. I cannot understand that he says one thing and in the next sentence he says the opposite. It must be because he is much more intelligent than I am. That’s why I love him. Anyway, in one of these sentences he said something that made me feel good”.
The allure of absolute power can blind many a leader to the realities of nuclear war, but for the narcissist nuclear war is simply just an option to be considered. Putin has already started normalizing the idea of nuclear war since first mentioning it in February 2022 and as recent as Monday 6 May 2024 when he ordered nuclear weapons drills near the border with Ukraine. Sure he is using the threat to cower his critics in the West. But he is also insinuating that he is ready to go for broke.
Narcissists may believe they can control the uncontrollable or emerge victorious in a scenario of mutual destruction, but, like I said, they look at winning differently from you and me.
They may perceive it to be a win if they have created a historic catastrophe that pushes history’s greatest butchers such as Mao, Stalin and Hitler’s out of future history books. Their millions and millions of deaths are nothing compared to the nuclear holocaust of the narcissistic leader. The narcissist wins because he will live on in history for eternity, much more so than Mao or Stalin.
They also win, if they will live on as the richest person who has ever lived after they devastated a chunk of the world (and no-one would dare to fight him after they realized he doesn’t threaten to push the button, but actually does it). The narc can now exploit what is left of the world, and that is still a lot, more than any dictator has ever been able to call their property in the whole of history.
They may also perceive it as a win if they lose: “I had to try it else I would never have known. It was my duty.”
As far as his followers go: declining educational standards, ubiquitous misinformation, 70% (my estimate) of the population unable to develop deliberate thinking skills (Kahneman’s System 2 thinking) and remaining trapped in their reactive, instinctive, intuitive merry-go-rounds (Kahneman’s System 1), a public exhausted by economic and social challenges, all this pushing people towards the need for a simple solution, no matter what.
They simply want a hero who takes care of it all and who reduces problems to soundbites.
No more politicking! Let’s call it out: we must fight ‘the others’ because they are the cause of all my sorrows. 30% of the US population is already under the spell of their cult-leader. These are the people who say — There is nothing that Dear Leader can do to prevent me from voting for him. Yes, even if he starts killing people, that is ok (even Trump’s lawyer argues that such a thing would be legal).
MAD assumes rational actors acting in their self-interest. Where this theory of the Threat of Mutually Assured Destruction fails is when it regards rational self-interest as if it were a single well-described general rule, or set of rules. A set of rules that applies to every person in the same way.
But self-interest means something very different to a socially aware empathetic person who regards the national interest as their main concern than it means to a completely self-absorbed, egotistical psychopathic narcissist (many pleonasms just to make my point).
While MAD might prevent most rational leaders from launching nuclear weapons, it may not be effective against those who only believe in their own personal self-interest and are swayed by grandiosity or the delusion of invincibility.
Beware the leader who presents himself as the Savior or the Redeemer. And beware of yourself when you say I follow my leader no matter what. Follow someone blindly at your own risk (and also at the risk of all those who tried to prevent this foreseeable Armageddon).
🌐 Sources
- scientificamerican.com — What Was the Manhattan Project?
- jstor.org — Nuclear Myths and Political Realities
- iaea.org — Atoms for Peace Speech
- wikipedia.org — John von Neumann
- hansard.parliament.uk — UK’s Nuclear Deterrent
- nuclearmuseum.org — Eisenhower’s “Atoms for Peace” Speech
- amazon.com — Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
