Comment in Expressen, 25 February 2022  

Mutual madness?

For a few decades, the world lived in fear of an all-consuming nuclear war between the superpowers of the United States and the Soviet Union. For a few decades thereafter, the world lived in the assurance that no superpower leader would be mad enough to launch one.
Thus, both superpowers were constantly busy developing their nuclear second-strike capability, the ability to respond to an all-devastating nuclear attack with another one. Mutual Assured Destruction became the name of the doctrine that was to ensure that the superpowers' growing nuclear arsenals would never be used, a doctrine aptly summed up in the acronym MAD.

Certainly, no leader of a nuclear superpower would be mad enough to risk a nuclear war. 

Subsequently, MAD would lead to a mutually assured disarmament treaty (START, Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty) that reduced the excesses in strategic nuclear missiles and bombers and limited the total number of nuclear warheads. Certainly still more than enough for MAD, but still indicative of a sense of self-preservation in a maddening predicament. The last START treaty was signed in April 2010 by the then US President Barack Obama and the then Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, and whatever one might say about them, they very well knew what was at stake.

Since then, the US has had a president named Donald Trump and Russia is presently having a president named Vladimir Putin, both superpowers thus having had leaders showing disturbing symptoms of madness in one destabilizing constellation or another. Both have also indicated a readiness to use their enormous power to impose their madness on the world.

On the eve of the invasion of Ukraine, Vladimir Putin threatened those who would try to interfere in his war with "consequences of a kind you have never seen before in your history". 

What consequences he had in mind was left for the world to imagine.

With superpower leaders like these it seems clear that the central premise of MAD has fallen. We have now learnt that a more or less unhinged person can become president of a nuclear superpower, and that MAD therefore is no longer a reliable deterrent. 

In any case, Vladimir Putin seems psychologically more inclined to launch a chicken race to the abyss than the present leaders of the West.

Donald Trump calling Vladimir Putin a genius only confirms the new MAD state of affairs.

After the attack on the US Congress on 6 January 2021, the top US military leadership was seriously concerned about what the increasingly unstable Trump might do and, at a meeting on 8 January, made sure to circumscribe the president's access to the nuclear command button (according to Peril, by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa). 

With the invasion of Ukraine, Vladimir Putin seems to have calculated that MAD would give him a free hand to wage an unprovoked “conventional” war in the midst of Europe, and there is no telling whether he might be mad enough to test MAD further by attacking a member of NATO. 

Hopefully it will never get to that point. 

Hopefully Vladimir Putin is a loser.   

Hopefully a Trump will never come to power again.

But madness is on the loose and the world must find a strategy to deal with it. 

MAD is not to be trusted anymore.