That has nothing to do with mutually assured destruction. MAD is about: “you strike at us? We will detect it and strike back at you destroying your cities. Our people might all die, but your people will too.”
It does not assume that any party can take out the strike force of any other party.
However many failures the Russian military may have, all it takes is 1 missile hitting a major city and you'll see more deaths in the US than have been seen in all the wars it fought combined.
No, it just means that the Soviets or the US can take each other out. That's why first-strike weapons where so important and ""too" much countermeasures against them was kind of "badly regarded".
And it was no "meme" but official politics, until Ronald Reagan and his star-wars program, where the end goal was not a stalemate towards the Soviets but the destruction of their capability to deliver aka "100% protection from soviet ICBM's"
It's worth noting that the targeting information for these strikes came from the US.[0]
Officials in the Biden administration first boasted about the role of US intelligence in these strikes, but the administration then decided that acknowledging US involvement in strikes on Russian generals is unwise.[1]
0. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/04/us/politics/russia-genera...
1. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/09/us/politics/biden-lend-le...
Hmm, dubious; surely if the targeting info came from the US, then the Ukrainians would have blown up several of their own hospitals, schools, wedding parties etc?!
Russia claims to have inherited that capability from the Soviet union, but that claim looks increasingly suspicious, with the war in Ukraine exposing not only systemic corruption in the Russian military, but also near-total failure on the intelligence front: officials were lining their pockets with funds destined to maintain and enhance military capabilities, and Russian generals were greeted with precision strikes upon arrival in Ukraine. If they can't keep their sh*t secret from Ukraine, how could they hope to keep a nuclear launch order secret from the US? A nuclear arsenal also requires expensive upkeep to remain functional, money that might also have been used to buy fancy appartments and yachts in London, Cyprus,... At this point it's questionable whether Russia would even be able to launch a succesful first strike and not see it intercepted by the US (they might still be able to land more than zero succesful strikes, but taking out US strike capabilities is a wholly different ball game).
Of course it's possible that other players might rise to be a threat, but basically I'm saying we should first check how realistic the scenario is before analyzing the whole situation through the lens of those overly simplified game theory models.