[DuskStar]

It depends on perspective. We in the west generally have a "no innocent lives lost ever" perspective. But sometimes "minimize total societal damage" looks pretty good too.

Is it better to live in a world where 1000 murders happen a year and half the murderers escape punishment because they ran, or one with 100 murders where 10 ran and family members were killed in their place? That's a lot less deaths!

Nuclear MAD is an extreme example of this - it's very obviously immoral to kill a few million civilians in retaliation for the murder of other civilians. But that's what MAD is! And in practice, it's likely prevented millions of deaths due to war.

[captainmuon]

The problem is, it is not clear that deterrance works for very serious crimes like murder. AFAIK murder rates are the same or higher in countries with harsher penalties. I could imagine it is very difficult to determine how the causality is. To maximize societal peace, it might be more beneficial to completely tabooize killing another person (including death penalty) and deal in another way with murderers.

It is also not clear if nuclear MAD actually "works". It is a convenient story to justify cold war security measures and military spending.

The deterrance value of promising a second strike is high, but the actual military gain of performing the second strike is small. States are strongly incentivized to announce MAD, but to not actually go through with it. If you are defeated by a first strike and cannot win the war conventionally, it is more logical to surrender unconditionally than to render the world uninhabitable. When it was clear that Germany would lose WW2, Hitler issued the Nero Decree and ordered the self-destruction of German infrastructure, but even the radicalized Germans didn't go though with it.

To add to this, the actual war plans of NATO and Warsaw Pact were centered around swift tank warfare in central Europe. Nuclear weapons were supposed to be used tactically, to deny ground and to destroy groups of tanks. But of course the US military preferred to talk about their awesome power to hit Russian cities, rather than about their plans to deploy nuclear mines in the middle of West Germany.

[samus]

Hitler's order for the German people to basically suicide didn't go through because it wouldn't have hindered the Allies at all, and everything would have sucked even more afterwards. The Germans were already concerned that the Allies would completely dismantle German civilization, and the latter were actually considering doing that for a time. Why help them with that?

After a nuclear strike, most population centers would be glassed and something like 70% or more of the urban population would be dead. As a survivor of the attacked nation, I would feel more than entitled to strike back. Maybe not at the entire world though.

Anyways, there would be no long, agonizing consideration whether to strike back or not, just semi-automated protocols to confirm and trigger a counterstrike. And dead hand protocols in case central control was eliminated.

Using nukes tactically in tank warfare would have eventually escalated to their strategic use. It was just a question of time since frontlines don't just freeze in conveniently unpopulated territory, but will eventually reach population centres.

Edit: Of course it is not possible to prove that MAD "works". In the case of an escalation, mutual destruction would prove that it didn't work. And the current "peace" can be plausibly argued to have come about anyways. But that's not really the point of MAD. In WW2, nukes were use to force an entrenched enemy nation to surrender. This use of nuclear weapons was indeed obsolete once all potential targets had their own nukes and could strike back if somebody tries to Hiroshima them.

[picsao]

Actually some of hitlers suicide orders went through. Germany relief on plundering Europe until the late stages of war. Then they converted all fertilizer fabrication to ammonition. Even if Germany had won 1945,they would have starved, because actually there were no measures taken for life to continue. Still got better of then the rest of Europe they laid to waste for insanity.