Film director Stanley Kramer once said he regretted not adding a fifth “Mad” to the title of his classic 1963 comedy, “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World,” starring Spencer Tracy and an ensemble and cameo cast of who was who in Hollywood. Fifty-nine years later, Vladimir Putin and his cronies in Moscow’s state-controlled media are fancifully adding it — except, unsettlingly, it is of the MAD variety. Once again, arguably for the fifth time in history, the global community is facing down the military doctrinal notion of mutually assured destruction (MAD) and contemplating the God-awful necessity of using it.
In the Fall of 1962, the United States for the first time was confronted by MAD head-on during the 35-day Cuban Missile Crisis. The U.S., having forward-deployed 15 nuclear-tipped PGM-19 Jupiter missiles in Turkey, clashed with the Soviet Union when the Kremlin, responding in kind, covertly positioned nuclear ballistic missiles of their own in Cuba. Months earlier, in July 1962, in what became known as the “No Cities” speech, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara had outlined Washington’s earliest public adoption of MAD, noting the Pentagon had the “striking power to destroy an enemy society if driven to it.”
In response to Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev’s nuclear provocations in Cuba, President John F. Kennedy, in a televised and radio address on March 22, 1962, underscored McNamara’s MAD policy, unambiguously declaring, “It shall be the policy of this nation to regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western Hemisphere as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response.” Kennedy’s clarity — and overt articulation of the consequences — were essential in effecting a peaceful end to history’s first existential MAD crisis.
Then, in October 1973, MAD took on new heights during the Yom Kippur War between Israel and a coalition of Arab states, including Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Libya, Saudi Arabia and Syria. Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir was awakened in the night by her military aide, General Yisrael Leor, “into her nightmare,” and quickly realized the Israelis had badly miscalculated, likely soon would be under attack, and were woefully unprepared. Israel nearly lost the war and its existence.
The 19-day war quickly devolved into a proxy fight between Washington and Moscow. Prior to game-changing U.S. military aid, Jerusalem, fearing defeat, began preparing F-4 Phantom fighters with Jericho 1 nuclear-tipped missiles. Israel, if need be, was determined to take down all of its attacking neighbors with it into Armageddon by launching preemptive nuclear strikes. MAD — but MAD as a shared experience.
MAD was evolving. It evolved further still in early September of this year as Pyongyang doubled down on its nuclear weapons program. North Korean President Kim Jong Un, for the first time in MAD history, is threatening to preemptively strike South Korea, Japan and the U.S., absent any overt cause or threat.
MAD continues to morph into yet a new form as “Israel and Iran are rapidly reaching an inflection point” over nuclear weapons. While Tehran faced off against President Biden in new nuclear negotiations that “stalled” in September, Jerusalem began assembling a coalition across the Mideast to put an end to Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s nuclear ambitions. In effect, it is MAD served cold — join us in the cause or suffer the fallout.
The fifth iteration of MAD, however, is the most maddening. It is a combination of Russian state-run nuclear kabuki theater airing across TV, radio and Telegram, mixed in with repeated gross violations of the United Nations Charter in Ukraine by Russia — paradoxically, one of the UN Security Council’s five permanent members. Nowhere was this more on display than when Russian media expert Julia Davis reported, “There was palpable frustration in the Russian media that many in the West misunderstood what Putin said — he was threatening the West, not Ukraine.” Putin’s version of MAD to Ukraine is: Concede your territory or we will nuke you.
Davis translated a video clip of Igor Korotchenko during one of his appearances as a “military expert” on Russia-1, wherein he declared, “The West has to understand: If certain weapons exist, taboos and limitations on using them could be lifted.” In the same clip, implying the use of nuclear weapons, host Olga Skabeyeva, known as Putin’s state TV “iron doll,” declared, “If you are trying to destroy us, you will be destroyed with us.” Skabeyeva went on to ask her panel, “What are our next actions? [Striking] their decision-making centers? In Kyiv, London, Washington — where?”
Putin, likewise, is dabbling in a nuclear three-ring circus of his own making. While Ukrainian military forces were overrunning Lyman in the Donetsk Oblast, Putin was celebrating in Red Square the annexation of four more Ukrainian oblasts — and telling anyone in the West who was listening, “I’m not bluffing about using nuclear weapons.” In ring two, according to The Sunday Times, Putin is considering a “significant [nuclear] escalation” by ordering a nuclear train to travel to Ukraine’s border and then — channeling his inner Kim Jong Un — conducting a nuclear test nearby. Ring three is underwater. NATO is warning member-states that “Russia’s Belgorod [nuclear] submarine no longer appeared to be operating out of its White Sea naval port.”
Retired U.S. Army Gen. David Petraeus, a former CIA chief, said it best in a recent appearance on ABC’s “This Week” — that Putin is losing and is desperate. “No amount of annexation, no amount of even veiled nuclear threats can get him out of this situation,” he said. Putin and his Russian state-media cronies must hear directly, clearly and publicly from Biden what Petraeus went on to say: Any use of nuclear weapons in Ukraine by Putin will result in the U.S. and NATO taking out “every Russian conventional force that we can see and identify on the battlefield.”
Petraeus gets it. This is not “Game of Thrones” (GOT). The Targaryens are not the only ones possessing firedrakes — GOT allegory for nuclear weapons. The U.S. and its NATO allies possess their own nuclear dragons. In GOT terms, Biden needs to find his inner Bran by bringing the same public clarity as Kennedy did in 1962. By wielding his Valerian sword and slaying Putin’s nuclear dragons, Biden could put an end to this madness. It’s not enough for Biden to say the risk is as it was in 1962; he must act to end it. If not, Putin — and undoubtedly, Beijing — will forever use the bluster of nuclear warheads as a means of wagging Washington and NATO by their tails — and in the process making God’s creation forever a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, MAD world.
Mark Toth is a retired economist, historian and entrepreneur who has worked in banking, insurance, publishing and global commerce. He is a former board member of the World Trade Center, St. Louis, and has lived in U.S. diplomatic and military communities around the world, including London, Tel Aviv, Augsburg and Nagoya. Follow him on Twitter @MCTothSTL.
Jonathan Sweet, a retired Army colonel, served 30 years as a military intelligence officer. His background includes tours of duty with the 101st Airborne Division and the Intelligence and Security Command. He led the U.S. European Command Intelligence Engagement Division from 2012-14, working with NATO partners in the Black Sea and Baltics. Follow him on Twitter @JESweet2022.