The Lead
How Shall We Address the MAD-ness Dominating Western Thinking?
by Dennis Small (EIRNS) — Sep. 21, 2025
On Tuesday, Sept. 23, the high-level General Debate of the 80th Session of the United Nations General Assembly will get underway in New York City. One of the urgent issues that will be taken up—if not the dominant issue of the entire session—will be the ongoing genocide being perpetrated against 2 million Palestinians in Gaza and, increasingly, the West Bank. As is traditional, the opening UN address will be delivered by Brazil, and on this occasion President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva will forcefully denounce that genocide. In fact, his government has just filed formal documents joining the South African suit filed before the International Court of Justice last year, denouncing Israel for the crime of genocide in Gaza.
In the days leading up to the UN session, nations such as Portugal and even Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom joined the more than 150 countries that already recognize the Palestinian state. An enraged Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met that news with a chilling response: “It will not happen,” he said. “A Palestinian state will not be established west of the Jordan River.” His government has already issued orders to the IDF to raze Gaza City to the ground, including the nearly half-million residents who have been unable to flee. Netanyahu added: “The response to the recent attempt to force a terrorist state upon us in the heart of our land will be given after my return from the United States,” said Netanyahu, who is set to depart for the U.S. later this week to speak at the UN before meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump. “Wait.”
Whence Netanyahu’s arrogant chutzpah? Less than two weeks ago, Israel carried out an air attack against Hamas targets in Qatar, which has served as the venue for ongoing negotiations, in total violation of international law—with the evident backing of Washington. In response, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan announced a mutual defense pact on Sept. 17, which de facto extends Pakistan’s nuclear weapons umbrella over Saudi Arabia, and likely other Arab nations in the region as well.
This marks a tectonic shift in the regional, and world, strategic situation. We have reached the point where a growing number of nations feel that they have been driven into the corner of threatened extinction, and that the only way they can defend themselves from a nuclear-armed Israel, or other nations ruled by madmen, is by the counter-threat of a nuclear response.
This is the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction, of raw nuclear terror, which Lyndon LaRouche fought so hard to replace with his proposal for a Strategic Defense Initiative, which was designed to render nuclear weapons technologically obsolete. LaRouche’s SDI, or beam weapons proposal was premised on scientific cooperation between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, on bringing into existence a new international security and development architecture to provide for the development and security of all nations. Instead, with the global financial breakdown crisis plunging the world into war and chaos, relations among nations have descended into the depths of the law of the jungle and pure MAD-ness.
Lyndon LaRouche explained the socio-political origins of the MAD doctrine in a Dec. 22, 1982 article headlined “A Reply to Soviet Critics: Why a Beam-Weapons ‘Arms Race’ Is Necessary,” written just three months before President Ronald Reagan adopted LaRouche’s SDI policy in a nationally-televised speech on March 23, 1983:
“The political-cultural shocks of the October 1962 Missile Crisis and the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy created political-psychological conditions, both in the U.S.A. and worldwide, in which frightened institutions were prone to tolerate the introduction of a strategic doctrine called Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD).”
The thoughtful reader will note the parallels with the “strategy of tension” being unleashed today, and the combination of fear and psychological malleability it is designed to produce in targeted populations.
“MAD tends to become a lever of thermonuclear blackmail,” LaRouche elaborated, “and a source of encouragement to lunatic degrees of irrationality in relations among states. Governments which are inclined to be irrational believe that they are freed from taking into account the practical consequences of their policies. It is the cultivation of that ‘freedom’ from obligation to weigh policies against their consequences, which is key to the growing danger of thermonuclear holocaust under present circumstances.”
LaRouche went on to propose the policy antidote to both MAD-ness on the strategic front, and the lunacy of the underlying economic policies of the dying trans-Atlantic system—a policy proposal of scientific and economic cooperation among nations, which remains as applicable today as it was 43 years ago:
“The deeper, longer-term significance of launching a beam-weapons development program, is the revival of a vigorous technological optimism, and with that a restoration of the hegemony of rationalism among the peoples and governments of the nations. If we undertake these measures, we shall have visibly freed humanity from 1) thermonuclear nightmares, shall have 2) attacked the terrifying problem of economic depression effectively, and 3) shall have unleashed those circumstances of world trade in which the technological development of the developing nations is undertaken as the late President Franklin Roosevelt envisaged for the work of the post-war period. By deploying advanced technology to solve simultaneously several of the leading problems oppressing and terrifying mankind, we shall have acted most efficiently to promote rapid embrace of technological optimism and rationality among the populations and governments of the nations.”
LaRouche concluded: “So, the clear technological solution to the problem of thermonuclear arsenals coincides with the indispensable measures of cultural engineering needed to attack and remove the causes of the growing war-danger.”
Contents
Strategic War Danger
- Top British Think Tank Insists, Set Up a Ukraine No-Fly Zone Now, Stop the Trump-Putin Talks Now (↓)
- Whom the Gods Would Destroy, They First Make Stupid (↓)
- India Responds to Saudi-Pakistan Mutual Defense Pact (↓)
- Australia, Canada, U.K., and Portugal Recognize Palestine (↓)
New World Paradigm
- Modi: India's Enemy #1 Is Dependence on Foreign Powers (↓)
- Global Times Editorial: Xi-Trump Phone Call a ‘Blessing for the World’ (↓)
U.S. and Canada
- CDC Vaccine Panel Makes It More Difficult To Obtain Essential Covid Vaccine (↓)
- White House Cancels Annual Report on U.S. Hunger (↓)
Harley Schlanger Update
Watch The Daily Update with Harley Schlanger, a short video update available every weekday morning from The LaRouche Organization.
