>'mutually assured destruction' meme is a cold-war-era concept relying on some strong assumptions - namely that any country would be able to credibly claim that

>'mutually assured destruction' meme is a cold-war-era concept relying on some strong assumptions - namely that any country would be able to credibly claim that they could take out US strike capabilities in the first place. No, it just means that the Soviets or the US can take each other out. That's why first-strike weapons where so important and ""too" much countermeasures against them was kind of "badly regarded". And it was no "meme" but official politics, until Ronald Reagan and his star-wars program, where the end goal was not a stalemate towards the Soviets but the destruction of their capability to deliver aka "100% protection from soviet ICBM's"