I think that, if we stay out of the least convenient possible world, this is impractical because of the uncertainty of intel. In a world where there was genuine uncertainty whether Saddam Hussein was building WMD, it seems like it would be difficult to gain enough certainty to launch against another country in peacetime. At least, until that other country announced "we have 20 experimental nuclear missiles targeted at major US cities, and we're going to go ahead with our first full-scale test of a nuclear warhead. Your move."

Today, we see this problem with attribution for computer network exploitation from (presumably) state actors. It's a reasonably good parallel to MAD, because we have offensive ability, but little defensive ability. In this environment, we haven't really seen computer network attacks used to control the development of intrusion/exploitation capabilities by state or even private actors (at least, as far as I know of).