largely because a civil war between communists and conservatives seemed
imminent, the King, Victor Emanuel III, appointing him prime minister to
avoid this. (Hitler’s first steps to power came in fairly similar circumstances, and
were also more or less legitimate, being based on success in parliamentary
elections.) His aggressive expansionist foreign policy, and the similarity of
creed and practice made an alliance (the Axis) with Nazi Germany more or less
inevitable. His fascist movement reconstructed Italian politics alongcorpora-
tistlines, and produced a formal one-party state in which only members of the
party could stand for office. At no stage, however, did the fascists very
successfully permeate the basic culture of Italy, and they were never, for
example, able to defy the Roman Catholic Church, with which, indeed,
Mussolini signed the Lateran Treaty, giving to thepapacymore security than
it had enjoyed under the previous regime.
Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD)
Mutual assured destruction is a basic concept in nuclearstrategy. It refers to a
situation where the forces of opposed countries are so great and invulnerable to
such an extent that neither can possibly hope to inflict damage on the other,
however great, which would prevent the other imposing an unbearable cost on
the aggressor. As such it is a vital element in calculating the requirements for
second strike capacity. It should be noted that forces do not need to be equal
for mutual assured destruction to exist, as long as the stronger power cannot
hope to remove enough of the power of the weaker in afirst striketo save
itself from prohibitive damage. It should also be noted that unless ‘destruction’
is taken as very literal and very total, the concept involves an unavoidably
subjective element, because how much damage countryxis prepared to risk
for the chance of a successful pre-emptive strike against countryyis a matter
for the judgement of the rulers of countryx. Introduced as US strategic policy
by Robert McNamara under the Kennedy administration during the early
1960s, it was crudely quantified as requiring the capacity to destroy, in
retaliation, one-third of the enemy’s population and two-thirds of its industrial
capacity. It is sometimes argued that only the threat of mutual assured
destruction prevented war in the period from the late 1960s, when the Soviet
Union reached effectivenuclear paritywith the USA, until the essential
demise of the nuclear threat with the end of thecold war. However, the
strategy was perhaps less significant than has been claimed, particularly as the
Soviet Union continued to believe that there were conditions under which a
nuclear war could be meaningfully ‘won’, and even more so after the Amer-
icans moved, in the 1980s, towards a war-fighting doctrine with their Strategic
Defense Initiative. (See alsoSon of Star Wars.)
Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD)