“at one point the US and Russia had both pre-committed to extinguishing all of civilization if either were to attack the other.”
Do you have a reference? Which time in particular are you thinking of? My recollections are that at least from the 1970s on, US doctrine was to hit only militarily significant targets. Of course, millions of civilians would die as a side effect, and perhaps civilization would end in some sense, but it was not an explicit policy.
You are correct, it was not an explicit policy; the death of civilization is a natural consequence of the nuclear winter which comes from hitting thousands of militarily significant targets. The big factor there is that every nuclear weapons site is a military target, and many of them are underground missile silos. These require ground impact to destroy, which increases the nuclear winter effect.
But speaking to the broader point about explicit policies: there is a strong belief that explicit policies are bad on critical issues, and that strategic ambiguity is preferable because it reduces the ability of the opponent to calculate whether unilateral action is worth the risk. A lot of this kind of reasoning is due to Thomas Schelling, and there’s a good review of his book Strategies of Conflict on LessWrong which covers the section which explains why so much overwhelming destructive power was desirable. The best description I have found recently of strategic ambiguity is in a piece for the National Institute of Public Policy by Keith B. Payne, which discusses it in the context of Taiwan. The author is notable here because he’s a fairly comprehensive critic of the Schelling-school of nuclear deterrence thought, and wrote a good book on the subject.
“at one point the US and Russia had both pre-committed to extinguishing all of civilization if either were to attack the other.”
Do you have a reference? Which time in particular are you thinking of? My recollections are that at least from the 1970s on, US doctrine was to hit only militarily significant targets. Of course, millions of civilians would die as a side effect, and perhaps civilization would end in some sense, but it was not an explicit policy.
You are correct, it was not an explicit policy; the death of civilization is a natural consequence of the nuclear winter which comes from hitting thousands of militarily significant targets. The big factor there is that every nuclear weapons site is a military target, and many of them are underground missile silos. These require ground impact to destroy, which increases the nuclear winter effect.
But speaking to the broader point about explicit policies: there is a strong belief that explicit policies are bad on critical issues, and that strategic ambiguity is preferable because it reduces the ability of the opponent to calculate whether unilateral action is worth the risk. A lot of this kind of reasoning is due to Thomas Schelling, and there’s a good review of his book Strategies of Conflict on LessWrong which covers the section which explains why so much overwhelming destructive power was desirable. The best description I have found recently of strategic ambiguity is in a piece for the National Institute of Public Policy by Keith B. Payne, which discusses it in the context of Taiwan. The author is notable here because he’s a fairly comprehensive critic of the Schelling-school of nuclear deterrence thought, and wrote a good book on the subject.