This talk was given by Professor Stephen Van Evera for the Nuclear Weapons Teaching Seminar on April 12, 1996.
Nuclear weapons are an exception.
They overwhelm politics and doctrine. Five cascading technical effects flow from the nuclear revolution. Nuclear weapons pack tremendous explosive power in devices that are cheap, light, and easily hidden, protected, and delivered. Both can destroy the other's society even after absorbing an all-out counterforce attack by the other. In the Cold War, both the U.S. and USSR sought to avert MAD, preferring instead to deny the other a second-strike countervalue capability, but they could not escape it.