M.A.D Mutually assured Destruction
Mutual assured destruction, or mutually assured destruction (MAD), is a doctrine of military strategy and national security policy in which a full-scale use of high-yield weapons of mass destruction by two opposing sides would cause the complete annihilation of both the attacker and the defender.It is based on the theory of deterrence where the threat of using strong weapons against the enemy prevents the enemy's use of those same weapons. The strategy is a form of Nash equilibrium in which neither side, once armed, has any incentive to initiate a conflict or to disarm.
One can make the argument that the Cold War was nothing, if not a decades-long threat of complete and total nuclear annihilation. During this diplomatic and strategic conflict between the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and the United States, both sides engaged in massive nuclear proliferation (the stockpiling of nuclear weapons). Europe became a Cold War battleground, with nuclear missile silos located on both sides of the Iron Curtain. There was global tension over the very real possibility of death by nuclear bomb