Worldbuilding Weekend Prompt #61 - Mutually Assured Destruction

Welcome to the next in an ongoing series of writing prompts in the Worldbuilding community !

I'm aiming to post one of these each Sunday. They aren't a replacement for the excellent daily prompts from @worldbuilding they're just an extra opportunity if you have a writing itch you want to scratch. 😀

Image generated by AI in Wombo.art

The prompt this week is - Mutually Assured Destruction

I'm going topical with this week's prompt ! Mutually Assured Destruction, or MAD, is an acronym created during the Cold War to reflect the doctrine that each side would have the capacity to destroy the other (and probably the whole world) even after a massive first strike.

But Mutually Assured Destruction can also been seen on a few historical occasions in a more limited context. The Eastern Romans and Sassanids fought each other to a standstill, weakening each other so much that the Muslim conquest shortly afterwards was virtually unopposed. The Egyptians and Hittites fought at the Battle of Kadesh as the climax of a war which left both so badly weakened that they couldn't prevent the Sea Peoples taking the land they'd been fighting over (one of whose major tribes, the Peleset, gave the land a name it still has today). The Inca brothers Huascar and Atahualpa fought a terrible civil war from 1529-32; if it hadn't been so devastating, it's unlikely Pizzaro's miniscule army would have been able to conquer the whole Inca Empire.

Tell me a story of Mutually Assured Destruction from your setting ! Why are the two sides rivals, what weapons do they use ? How could (or do) they destroy each other ? Is there anything to hold them back ?

Just to add a bit of spice to things, the two entries I most like (and are linked in comments to this post, so I can find them !) that are posted by midnight (GMT) next Saturday will each get a prize of one Hive SBI.

This link will take you to the FAQ where you can read more about Hive SBI - it's a project I thoroughly support because it gives both the donor and winner a steady trickle of passive income paid out in the form of upvotes on posts.

Guidelines

I stole these guidelines straight from @worldbuilding prompts (I hope that's okay !), I couldn't have written them any better myself....

• Prompt replies may be anything! Art, game assets, stories, worldbuilding details, fake wiki entries, maps... whatever you want to create!
• Please ensure you reply to this post with a link to your reply
• Posting in or cross-posting to the Worldbuilding community is highly encouraged
• Use the hashtag #worldbuilding
• Prompt replies can be any length.

Some other neat communities for writing that you might want to check out are:

• Freewriters
• Scholar and Scribe
• Tabletop / DND
• The Ink Well

It can be a lot of fun to mix and match our prompts with some of these other community prompts.