Mad No More

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In 1964 Robert McNamara coined the phrase "assured destruction" to describe how the U.S. and the Soviet Union aimed atomic weapons at each other to deter a nuclear war. When wags prefixed the word mutual to McNamara's expression, the cold war era was acronymically defined: MAD.

. It is still a MAD, MAD world, but it is becoming less so. Last week George Bush terminated the Midgetman missile program, suspended work on the MX and halted production of the B-2 Stealth bomber and the advanced cruise missile. A day later, Russian President Boris Yeltsin responded by stopping production of two long-range bombers and cruise missiles and called on both sides to forgo targeting each other.

Yeltsin did not immediately reply to Bush's proposal that both sides eliminate land-based missiles with multiple independently targeted warheads (MIRVs), which are far more plentiful in the Russian arsenal. American officials expect further talks between the two leaders to produce such a breakthrough, particularly if Bush shows some flexibility about submarine- borne MIRVs, where the U.S. has the edge. At that point the world would no longer seem to be quite so MAD.