Talk:Assured destruction

This is all of a piece with the same rambling mess about 'multiparty assured destruction'. Removed for the same reason: personal creative work is not an encylopedia article, however well intentioned.

A sample sentence:
 * Subtle distinctions apply between assertion or assurance and measures of insurance (compensation possibly motivating recovery or revenge, e.g. a bounty) and ensurance? (interlocking treaties causing destruction to ensue to any party who refuses to cooperate in revenge, e.g. [three man cells]? in "terrorist" organizations).

- This is not "creative". Those are the dictionary definitions of the terms "insurance" and "ensurance" as properly applied to "destruction". If you don't understand that, fine, legitimate criticism, I'll write up "three man cell" and "bounty hunter" and then it will be easy to understand why "ensured" and "insured" are different - and why both differ from "assured".

The sentence you quote is absolutely neutral. You just aren't familiar with the underlying theory of strike-back (e.g. submarines as employed in nuclear warfare) guiding the insurance, nor likely the three man cell structure that kept the IRA from being broken by the British. If that's my fault, fine, I can fix that to explain. But ther'es nothing "personal" or "creative" about it.

I'm tired of arguing with you. Re: the other article, "multi-party" turns up plenty, and there is more use of "mutually" than "mutual". If I were to apply your standard I'd be moving "Mutual Assured Destruction" to "talk" for not appealing to a Reagan voter's biases about its effectiveness, and for dropping the "ly".

There is a double standard in your edits. If it comes from some US history book, like "peace movement" or 'M.A.D.' as defined in 1950, you like it, even if the definition is totally useless in 2002 and only of historical interest.

If it makes any even-obvious connection or implication from the language chosen in multiple profession-specific terms, you consider it somehow non-neutral... Gandhi thinks "eye for an eye" describes riots, death penalty, and war all at once, but you don't.  What do you know that Gandhi doesn't?

Guess what: reality is not neutral. Current use of terms is slightly more controversial. Neutrality requires negotiation, and some willingness to learn.

This is your problem not mine. You may dislike the writing, fine, that can be fixed. But disregarding fundamental axioms of philosphy with names that recur in multiple phrases, or failing to make critical distinctions like 'insurance' versus 'assurance' versus 'ensurance' (which are made in one quote by an Air Force general in an in-context quote), is just a disservice to the reader.

If someone comes here to research a topic like MAD, they want some context, beyond history.

If this is a history book, fine, it's a history book. But that wasn't what it was claimed to be...

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I agree. Distinctions between words are important. What I find interesting about that sentence is that it has a sing-song clanging tone to it that reminds me of things I recognise from other contexts.

Skip the amateur psychiatry - actually all psychiatry is amateur psychiatry.

Words have common suffixes for historical reasons or because they are or were deliberate constructions. "surance" means something - "making it sure" etc - which insurance, assurance, and ensurance all do in different ways to different standards of certainty.

An author who opposes escalating warfare and death penalties and assassination and bombing children on the same grounds is going to appear to be "preaching" or "clanging an alarm bell" to one who has different moral rationales for doing these things. That's a normal clash of views.

However, the sentence works just as well without the examples, or with them toned down somewhat. If you find two better words to contrast with "assured", do so.

Putting "terrorist" in quotes, or not using it at all, is BBC standard... they use the term only in quotes and will not use it in commentary at all.

So, perhaps you are reacting emotionally to things that aren't controversial but just difficult to discuss?

But, I wouldn't want to play psychiatrist...

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I'm saying clanging is not a good thing to do in your text if you want to get taken seriously. It's a writing style thing.

By the way, I like the way you picked up on my use of 'clanging' and turned it into an auditory image in a different context ('clanging an alarm bell'); and then followed it up with the similar (and alliterative) 'clash' in the next sentence.

The Anome

- Understood and appreciated. In part it's a question of reasonable goals: Being "taken seriously" is one reasonable goal;  Being mnemonic and using phrases that are "easy to remember" (like the insurance/assurance/ensurance distinction) is another reasonable goal, and if you really aren't inventing anything new, and the mnemonic does no harm, then, it may be a more reasonable goal for an encyclopedia. A third goal is having fun, and I'm glad you like *something*.

The assured destruction of texts or edits - easily replaced - is not at all the same thing as the assured destruction of bodies or ecologies... each of which tends to be unique.

Accordingly, the mutually assured destruction of each other's work isn't a life-or-death deal in the sense that oh say Mutual Assured Destruction with some leftover arsenal is. There may be a reasonable method to de-escalate our conflict over this, whereas there may be no reasonable method to take apart 1000s of warheads and distribute the fissiles and brainpower that went into them so widely that no one assembles them again.

Anyway... you remind me of Richard Stallman. Once, when I tried to tell him that dangerous intellectual capital existed and would eventually have to be contained using some improved GPL type license, he argued for a while, then threw in 'the problem you are trying to solve, does not exist'. Which was before anyone got anthrax in the mail... or Dubya took the anthrax research and nuclear power plant plans off the net...

Very minor mod, generalizing away from just 'nuclear' - should probably mention all weapons of mass destruction with unacceptable strategic outcome. Nuclear and plague and nerve gas are tactics - forcing your opponent to the negotiating table no matter how much he hates you is the strategic purpose.

Everyone uses that Gandhi quote out of context...

I don't care how erudite its author may be, or how important he may perceive its goals, the sentence quoted does not bear even the slightest resemblance to an understandable English sentence capable of enlightening anyone about anything. If you really have something to say, I strongly suggest you find some trusted soul who understands you and knows how to write to do the communication for you--this stuff is just a rambling intellectual tone poem, not useful information. --LDC

- I don't accept that definition of "useful information" - the distinction between insurance, assurance, and ensurance is pretty damn useful once you know it... but I admit that sentence was not the ideal way to make it... more like pseudocode than a tone poem...

anyway, whatever, the general comment on writing style is not warranted. I think you will find the vast majority of my sentences well constructed, and only a few addressing very complex topics are quite as overworked as that one.

And those tend to get hacked out, anyway... thanks. -- Removed this nonsense. In international relations and nuclear strategy, assured destruction has a specific meaning and this ain't it.


 * More limited scenarios of assured destruction, e.g. in asymmetric warfare or biowar, assume that the weapons on each side may differ, and tactics may differ, but the strategic outcome and diplomatic imperative will be the same.


 * "abstinence is forgiveness only when there is the power to punish; it is meaningless when it pretends to proceed from a helpless creature" - Gandhi

- Untrue. Most of the debate on this in recent years has focused on non-nuclear and asymmetric players. No serious military debate considers the strategic implications of "bottom up" weapons like suitcase nukes or biological agents to be fundamentally different - the new problem is knowing who to "strike back" at.

There is no longer any such field as "nuclear strategy", at least not since nuclear weapons have been proposed as a "solution" to other problems (deep caves, retaliation for biological attack, last ditch use against alife forms). Strategy is just strategy now.

As it is, you have defined the term into uselessness and irrelevance. Nice work.

As usual, sticking to the obsolete thing you do understand to avoid the scary thing you don't understand... Human Ostriches 101.

The original article may not have been so clear, but it generalized the notion of assured destruction from death penalty right up to global thermonuclear war and made a neat and correct distinction between tactics in actual use (assurance i.e. threat, insurance i.e. bounty, ensurance i.e. the last strike capability) in current asymmetric conflict.

You might not personally like that, but it's actually relevant to stuff on TV in a way your article isn't.

Keep working on it, though. You may get a clue someday.

Yeah, like you have a lot of credibility when you don't even have the balls to use a real name, and someone who spends time arguing definitions of words as if those were facts or even useful except within contexts narrower than any of reader is ever likely to be in. Yes, the times have changed from what "MAD" used to mean, but that doesn't change what the term meant when it was created, and that is what an encyclopedia should cover--when the term was created and why, and how it was really used by real people in the media of the time. Yes, that political environment might no longer exists. Fine--write a god damned dissertation on it and leave us the hell alone to write something that might actually be useful to someone. --LDC

23 October 2003 - Attempting a complete rewrite. Will attempt to keep all the flavors of 'assured destruction', not just the nuclear context. Comments on the neutrality and completeness of this version are encouraged. Rossami 20:33, 23 Oct 2003 (UTC)