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<quote><p>MAD prevented WWIII. I don't care whether the people who build them or the people who authorize their construction are corrupt, or worship a giant statue of a sexually aroused Beelzebub, the fact is that we are kept largely secure from would be Napoleons, Hitlers and Stalins by the mere fact that these weapons exist.</p></quote>
<p>Hitler would have pushed the button just before he pulled the trigger.</p><p>MAD only works when all the owners of knukes are reasonably sane.</p></quote>
Not entirely plausible. Hitler had vast stores of chemical weapons that he refused to use because of the mass destruction that he knew they would cause and even he didn't want that because he remembered the horror they caused after being attacked by chemical weapons when he was a soldier in the trenches in WWI. He could have utterly destroyed hundreds of thousands of invading Russian troops daily for a few day or weeks, until the Russian counter-attacked with the same weapons. But he didn't. If both sides had nuclear weapons, I'm sure the same rationalization would have taken place even if he was going to suicide the next day.