"There is only one way safely and legitimately to reduce the cost of national security, and that is to reduce the need for it. And this we're trying to do in negotiations with the Soviet Union. We're not just discussing limits on a further increase of nuclear weapons; we seek, instead, to reduce their number. We seek the total elimination one day of nuclear weapons from the face of the Earth. Now for decades, we and the Soviets have lived under the threat of mutual assured destruction; if either resorted to the use of nuclear weapons, the other could retaliate and destroy the one who had started it. Is there either logic or morality in believing that if one side threatens to kill tens of millions of our people, our only recourse is to threaten killing tens of millions of theirs?"
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Ronald Reagan, Second Inaugural Address, delivered 21 January 1985, Rotunda of the Capitol, Washington D.C.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mutual_assured_destruction
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Mutual assured destruction
Mutual assured destruction (MAD) is a doctrine of military strategy and national security policy in which a full-scale use of nuclear weapons by two or more opposing sides would cause the complete annihilation of both the attacker and the defender. The term "mutual assured destruction", commonly abbreviated "MAD", was coined by Donald Brennan to argue that holding weapons capable of destroying society was irrational.
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