McNamara called the new-old doctrine “Assured Destruction.” (A few years later, a pro-counterforce defense analyst named Donald Brennan would dub this concept “Mutual Assured Destruction” so that it formed the acronym “MAD,” a deprecating term that would soon be adopted by the doctrine’s advocates as well.) To give the term a scientific tinge, McNamara’s chief whiz kid, Alain Enthoven, who’d run the secretary’s “systems analysis” shop since the start of his tenure in the Pentagon, calculated that the Soviets would be sufficiently deterred if the U.S. retaliatory strike could kill 30 percent of
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