Mutually assured destruction

A topic presented in this section was commonly held idea that a world without nuclear weapons would be a safer world. The countries would not be able to resort to nuclear weapons to destroy and opponent that they were facing in all-out war. The support for this way of thinking did not surprise me because the arguments for this position are as one would expect. When it comes to open war we still have to take into account that if a country Is on the verge of losing a war they might resort to creating nuclear weapons because we possess the knowledge to do so. The topic of a world without nuclear weapon was not the one that intrigued me the most in this sections readings and lecture. The idea of Mutually assured Destruction was the topic that I found the most intriguing. The idea is that Mutually assured Destruction would help to prevent a nuclear war in which the use of high powered weapons of mass destruction by two or more countries would bring about the end of those countries; producing a result that would cause the complete, and  total annihilation of each side of the conflict. As many authors in this week’s section has stated a nuclear war is a war that has no victor it can only assure reciprocal destruction. The mutually assured Destruction is based on the idea of deterrence in which one country attempts to discourage or restrain from acting an opposing country’s nuclear attack by the capacity of their own nuclear weapons or the threat of retaliating. This form of deterrence can take many forms as Schelling states “Mutual nuclear deterrence could take the form of letting it be known that any evidence of nuclear rearmament would be promptly reciprocated. Reciprocation could take the form of hastening to have a weapon to use against the nuclear facilities of the enemy”(Schelling, A world without nuclear weapons, pg 126). The thought that the countries of the world could actually help to keep it safe, and prevent complete destruction by creating weapons of Mass destruction astonishes me. We are talking about weapons such as the ones the United States used in World War 2 that killed over a hundred thousand people and decimated two cities; being a possible answer of how to insure that nuclear bombs are not used. Mutually assured  destruction is a topic that I look forward to learning more about in future readings, especially with continuing conflict between countries with nuclear weapons attempting to prevent countries without nuclear weapons from developing them.