Noah Smith wrote an excellent defence of mutually assured destruction as a force for peace today. A key step towards deterring nuclear war is making sure no one can survive it so there is no point in starting one.
Source: Fewer Nukes Could Make the World Less Safe – Noah Smith.
Disarmament is impossible unless there is universal brain surgery to eliminate all knowledge of nuclear weapons and the principles of physics behind their development as Tom Schelling argued in 1962
A sharp distinction is often drawn between arms control and disarmament. The former seeks to reshape military incentives and capabilities; the latter, it is alleged, eliminates them. But the success of either depends on mutual deterrence. Short of universal brain surgery, nothing can erase the memory of weapons and how to build them.
If “total disarmament” is to make war unlikely, it must reduce the incentives. It cannot eliminate the potential for destruction; the most primitive war can be modernized by rearmament as it goes along.
Schelling wrote a fine essay in 1985 about what went wrong with the arms control. One of the things that went wrong was the obsession with reducing the number of nuclear weapons rather than manging the incentives to use them.
Nobody ever offers a convincing reason for preferring smaller numbers (I may exaggerate: saving money is a legitimate reason…). And some people think that with fewer numbers there is less likelihood that one will fall into mischievous hands or be launched by mechanical error; this I think is incorrect, but may not be worth refuting because it is in no one’s main motivation.
For the most part, people simply think that smaller numbers are better than bigger… If people really believe that zero is the ultimate goal it is easy to see that downward is the direction they should go. But hardly anyone who takes arms control seriously believes that zero is the goal.
Always beware of the man with one nuclear bomb, not the man with 1000. Schelling argues for force postures consisting of
economical and reliable retaliatory weapons that are neither susceptible to preemption nor capable of preemption.
Schelling went on to argue that stabilising, offsetting nuclear force postures share three “crucial elements:” an assured retaliatory capability, “restrained targeting and some capacity for war termination.” Counterforce targeting, the enemy of stabilizing deterrence and arms control, was ignored once these capabilities were in reach while the ability to terminate a war is hardly discussed.
The hotline was developed at the suggestion of Thomas Schelling in the aftermath of the Cuban missile crisis because Washington and Moscow lacked any quick way of communicating.
Radio Moscow broadcast the Russian acceptance of the American offer that resolved the crisis because there is no faster way of communicating the message in the final hours of the crisis before it went out of control. Quick thinking by the Russians.
Schelling had a good point when he said brinkmanship is not a cliff, but a curve slope that you can fall down unwillingly. In the Cuban missile crisis that was possible simply through the lack of quick communications to terminate a crisis.
HT: What Went Wrong with Arms Control?
Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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