Aucbvax.2195
fa.arms-d
utzoo!duke!decvax!ucbvax!REM@MIT-MC
Thu Jul 9 07:04:27 1981
From: Robert Elton Maas <REM MIT-MC AT>
It should be pointed out (in regard to CS.WEBB's claim that GRIT can
never reduce weapons levels below MAD level) that MAD is quite loosely
defined. This looseness isn't due to the logical definition, but
rather due to available data. You see, "the unknowns are bigger
than the knowns", i.e. mutual ASSURED destruction of 10% means that
between 10% and 99% of the population will be destroyed. All it
means logicaly is that at least 10% are guaranteed to be destroyed
even if all factors go against the attacker, like fog which blocks
the flash of heat&light and light breezes that fail to distribute
fallout. But most of the time things aren't that bad (for the
attacker) and in fact many more people will be killed than MAD
calculations would give, like twice or three times as many, until
you start approaching 100% when it's more accurate to say only 1/2
or 1/3 as many will survive as MAD would predict (or maybe 0 will
survive even though MAD calculations said 95% killed). Thus we
could go well below 100% MAD and still be pretty confident that
we'll utterly destroy the "enemy" just by reasonable luck. Thus
we migh be willing to go below MAD even if our goal is to destroy
the "enemy" totally.
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