1994: Study Proves Soviet Nuclear Policy ‘Remarkaby Like’ US’s

American researcher John Hines and his team complete a five-year study of Soviet nuclear plans, based on interviews with 22 senior Soviet military personnel. The study finds that by the early 1970s, the Soviets realized that any possible nuclear exchange with the US would have been so cataclysmically devastating to both nations that no one could “win” such a war in any real sense. The Soviets never accepted the doctrine of MAD—“mutually assured destruction”—in an official sense, but, like the US, their policy was deterrence based on retaliation. Like the US, they believed that any “limited” nuclear exchange in Europe would quickly escalate into global thermonuclear holocaust, but they planned for it because they needed a strategy for a European conflict. In 2008, American author J. Peter Scoblic will write, “In short, Soviet nuclear doctrine was remarkably like our own.” [Scoblic, 2008, pp. 109]