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I still don't understand how a major nuclear accident didn't happen (at minimum), or really, a full nuclear exchange, given the game theoretic and technical cha
by rdl 10y ago
I still don't understand how a major nuclear accident didn't happen (at minimum), or really, a full nuclear exchange, given the game theoretic and technical challenges of having multiple nuclear arsenals on hair trigger alert for decades.
Given that many US weapons weren't even one-point safe until the 80s, and I doubt Soviet weapons were better, and there were a fair number of routine accidents with those weapons, there must have been some undisclosed policy of secretly keeping the weapons even less ready than has ever been reported, or we've been unbelievably lucky. (If I could have been completely certain it would remain secret, deploying primarily inert weapons (just replace the HEU with lower enriched uranium, or for plutonium weapons, even just screwing up the lensing) would have been very tempting. If you believe in MAD, then really only deterrence has any value; the retaliatory value in reality could be forgone.)
It would also account for why weapons were never used intentionally post WW2 -- if you knew your arsenal actually was disabled, you'd bluster even more but never use it.
- rjsw 10y agoSome of the early weapons were really primitive [1], I have read a suggestion that it wouldn't have been possible to land a plane with an armed bomb aboard and there was no way to disarm it. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Danube_%28nuclear_weapon%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Danube_%28nuclear_weapon%...
- homero 10y agoThe Americans show just had a scene where a Russian thought a nuke was coming from America but didn't launch back. The equipment was detecting something else but did he just not launch because he couldn't see the world burn? We were 1 key press away from Armageddon. The article talks about why the USA declassified this. Well Russia stole a lot of info and they probably had it already so might as well release it. It looks doable to citizens so they feel patriotic.
- golergka 10y agoThis is based on true story: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov
- rdl 10y agoAlong with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasili_Arkhipov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasili_Arkhipov two of the people who did the most to not eliminate mankind.
- arethuza 10y agoI can strongly recommend One Minute to Midnight for a minute by minute account of the Cuban missile crisis - it is incredibly tense even though we know it worked out OK! http://www.amazon.com/One-Minute-Midnight-Kennedy-Khrushchev/dp/1400078911 http://www.amazon.com/One-Minute-Midnight-Kennedy-Khrushchev...
- amatix 10y agoAn "if things had gone slightly differently" version at one of the alternate history forums: http://www.alternatehistory.com/forum/threads/the-cuban-missile-war-timeline.65071/ http://www.alternatehistory.com/forum/threads/the-cuban-miss... -> world annhiliation
- mseebach 10y agoThis comic has a pretty plausible explanation: http://smbc-comics.com/index.php?id=3994 http://smbc-comics.com/index.php?id=3994
- emiliobumachar 10y agoI don't think even total nuclear war would actually estinguish humans down to the last one. Especially since a few people were prepared, with multi decade shelters.
- mikeash 10y agoFurther, a nuclear war in 1956 would have been far from total. The balance of nuclear forces was absurdly lopsided until maybe the late 1960s. For example, if the Cuban Missile Crisis had gone hot, the USSR would have been utterly destroyed, while the US might have lost a few major cities. Not something you ever want to happen, obviously, but it wouldn't even destroy the country, let alone the species. 1956 would have been even more lopsided. Hard information was difficult to come by, and it didn't help that the USSR worked hard to inflate perceptions of its own capabilities (e.g. Khrushchev saying that they were pumping out ICBMs like sausages, when they had almost none).
- ZanyProgrammer 10y agoI wish I could upvote this comment more. The nuclear OOB really, really favors the US for about a decade after this.
- arethuza 10y agoMy understanding is that the US government and intelligence agencies had a pretty good understanding of the strategic capabilities of the Soviets but chose to overstate the threat for domestic political reasons. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missile_gap https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missile_gap
- mikeash 10y ago
- arethuza 10y ago"we've been unbelievably lucky" That and the courage of many people at all levels who chose not to escalate incidents into situations where war would be inevitable.
- ekianjo 10y agoThere were actually very serious close calls on both sides (but we only know of the US side for the most part) and some are detailed in the book "Command and Control". Excellent read by the way.
- rdl 10y agoEvery one of the close calls somehow didn't result in a criticality even on weapons which were fundamentally likely to detonate in an accident. That itself is highly suspect.
- trhway 10y agoI'm surprised that out of 50-60K USSR warheads no warhead got lost/stolen/sold during 199x. It is like different kind of Russians were manning it :)
- ptaipale 10y ago>I'm surprised that out of 50-60K USSR warheads no warhead got lost/stolen/sold during 199x. Well, do we really know?
- pavlov 10y agoLet's assume a Soviet warhead did get stolen in 1993 and was recovered somewhere in Kazakhstan with the help of a US special operation. Would any involved party want to publish the event? Russians wouldn't want to advertise their weakness. Kazaks (in this scenario) wouldn't want to advertise that they cooperated with Americans. And USA wouldn't want to advertise how easy it was to steal a warhead and sell it for a relative pittance. In a few decades, I think we're going to hear some interesting horror stories of the post-Soviet years, similar to the early '80s near-Armageddon scenario of the Soviet false alarm that wasn't published at the time (the Stanislav Petrov incident).
- lambdadmitry 10y agoThere was a serious undercover US effort to prevent this. For example, half a ton of highly enriched, weapon-grade Uranium was transported from Kazakhstan [1][2] in 199x; US also helped to prevent proliferation of weapon-grade Plutonium from the former test site [3]. There is also a non-confirmed suggestion that actual nuclear weapons become unusable if abandoned [4]. [1]: http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB491/ http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB491/ [2]: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/09/20/AR2009092002881.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/09... [3]: http://belfercenter.ksg.harvard.edu/files/Plutonium%20Mountain-Web.pdf http://belfercenter.ksg.harvard.edu/files/Plutonium%20Mounta... [4]: https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4hh0h7/does_modern_nuclear_weapons_really_demand_active/ https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4hh0h7/does_mod... edit: formatting, one more link
- 10y ago
- caf 10y agoThe last head of Strategic Air Command said, after retiring, that "We escaped the Cold War without a nuclear holocaust by some combination of skill, luck and divine intervention, and, I suspect, the latter in greatest proportion."
- alphapapa 10y agoIf a general said something like that today, he'd probably be written about in the newspapers, have a twitter mob after him, and be forced into early retirement. :|