The Fate of Nuclear Strategists: MAD-ness

 

The Fate of Nuclear Strategists: MAD-ness

Peter Schultz

 

                  “The nuclear strategists had come to impose order – but in the end, chaos still prevailed.” [The Wizards of Armageddon, 391]

 

                  Reformulation: The politicians had come to impose order – but in the end, chaos still prevailed. Or even more so: The politicians, through politics, fed the chaos, facilitated it. So, politics is merely disguised chaos or is chaos disguised. Politics as Pascal’s “madhouse.”

 

                  The fate of the nuclear strategists, viz., who created “a living dreamworld” wherein their strategies “became a catechism, [whose] first principles [were] carved into the mystical stone of dogma,” is simply the fate of all affirmations of the political.