9 ms·

World War Three, by Mistake

123 points by betolink 10y ago

ekianjo 10y ago
An article very much on the same line as the author's book (and recent movie) on "Command and Control". A very good read by the way. On a side note, the title is poorly chosen - if a nuclear exchange occurs, it's not World War III, it's just "game over" for everyone. Even the few survivors would have a very harsh time just to endure the nuclear winters, lack of energy, no medical supplies and complete destruction of infrastructure and production capacities - even simply finding places to live without massive radiation contamination would be a serious challenge. I fear there would be historian to recount what would happen next.
- themodelplumber 10y ago
  I thought nuclear winters were found to be a myth? (A minor point of course)
  - wwweston 10y ago
    How can they be a myth? Harsher winters from volcanic eruptions appear to be a historical fact. Nuclear explosions can kick up a huge storm of stuff into the atmosphere -- that's part of their point. Multiple explosions, multiple effects, likely similar enough to volcanic winters. Or worse, depending on the breadth of the exchange. And, of course, there's making massive amounts of the environment radioactive.
    - justin66 10y ago
      > Nuclear explosions can kick up a huge storm of stuff into the atmosphere -- that's part of their point. I've never read that. It's easy enough to do, but the (planned) usage of these weapons (outside of hitting the enemy's heavily hardened targets on the ground) tends to rely on airbursts. I don't remember either side relying on nuclear winter strategically. The logic of MAD is terrible enough to serve as a deterrent even without maximizing dust in the atmosphere. I remember the disarmament advocates warning of nuclear winter, and the warmongery types minimizing its liklihood.
      - intransigent 10y ago
        Well, the idea of global doomsday for all, beyond mere tactical retaliation, is probably drawn from the media, with movies like Dr. Stangelove playing the part of the primary narrative. As to how much any world power has actually strategized and mobilized resources toward such an end (deliberate global suicide that destroys both sides by design) is likely to never be fully revealed, since it's a slightly alarming idea. Even so, some of the plans that have been revealed really are quite terrible. Bad enough, that the difference between deliberate and accidental nuclear winters could be considered an argument that splits hairs.
  - sehugg 10y ago
    No, it's even worse than we thought back then. Recent research predicts even a regional nuclear exchange could create global famine conditions for years (not to mention the political and economic instability): http://www.ippnw.org/nuclear-famine.html http://www.ippnw.org/nuclear-famine.html
- prodmerc 10y ago
  Depends on the nuclear players involved. If it's just the US and Russia (for whatever reason), plenty of the world will survive. Seems that people disagree on how many detonations in what places would be necessary for a serious and long nuclear winter. An all out nuclear world war (the reasons for which I could not begin to comprehend), then it's game over.
  - arethuza 10y ago
    I'm pretty sure that even if it was just a US and Russia thing that some places in the UK would be hit - the Fylingdales BMEWS site, possibly the UK Trident facilities on the Clyde.
    - SalimoS 10y ago
      I'm pretty sure that Africa won't get touched
  - ekianjo 10y ago
    The US and Russia would target each other allies' as well.
saycheese 10y ago
Interesting to me how people fear nuclear power, but seem indifferent to the threat of nuclear war. While it's hard to know, given the degree of secrecy on the topic, once ran across a reference to how what are now Russia's nuke systems could automatically be triggered; if this is still true, in my opinion, this is would be the most likely source of global thermonuclear war. "Only way to win is not to play."
- ErikVandeWater 10y ago
  "... or be on mars." -Elon
  - saycheese 10y ago
    Very likely that anyone on Mars would still be very dependent on Earth to survive until proven otherwise; at that point, it wouldn't be surprising if, as a control, nuclear countermeasures were deploy to insure Mars was at just as much risk.
  - canadian_voter 10y ago
    Or how about we set up a Mars colony, and do all of our wars there? Seems somehow appropriate. We can nuke the hell out of Mars and everyone on Earth will be fine. And what makes people think that in the event of global thermonuclear war that Mars will escape unscathed? Absolute ridiculous nonsense. The solution here is not to run away, it's to confront the problem directly. I never understood how anyone could think that "Earth is so messed up, with so many problems, it's just easier to colonize Mars." Earth is PERFECT for human beings to live on. Let's make it work.
    - saycheese 10y ago
      * Earth as a singular point of failure is not optimal.
  - vectorpush 10y ago
    An irradiated post-nuclear Earth is far more hospitable to life than Mars.
conistonwater 10y ago
I feel like there's a general puzzle here about statistics and decision theory: if the penalty for basing a bad decision on a false alarm is so high, does that mean that every alarm should be treated as a false alarm? And in that case, if you are resolved not to trust your sensors, what's the point of installing sensors in the first place?
- rtpg 10y ago
  I feel like this is the sort of thing that comes up a lot in business in general. You have some strong signal about something, but it's usually hard to take anything as gospel. Instead, you take it as a datapoint and investigate further. You can try treating every alarm as a false alarm (because, historically, nuclear wars have never been started), but still investigate what is happening. The alarm isn't useless, just not decisive.
- beejiu 10y ago
  Game theory is probably more relevant in the nuclear war scenario.
  - marcosdumay 10y ago
    The most interesting part is that no party wins anything by retaliating, only loses more. It must be very interesting how this fact in included on strategies.
    - tlb 10y ago
      Not true. If country A launches a fraction of its missiles, country B has a motivation to launch tactical missiles towards A's launch sites to prevent them launching more. And you never want to launch all your missiles, because then you have no bargaining power. So any nuclear conflict is likely to involve several exchanges.
  - eli_gottlieb 10y ago
    Game theory applies to rational, intelligent agents. In real life, unfortunately, the people with their fingers on the nuclear buttons are fanatical idiots these days. And no, I'm not just referring to the one in my own country.
rrggrr 10y ago
Is rhetoric the real problem, or is it nuclear proliferation? Schlosser's book, which I've read and much admire, makes the point that nuclear stewardship is insanely difficult. If the world is less safe its because where there were once two nuclear powers, there are now between nine and twelve depending whom you ask. Rhetoric is the least of the world's concerns when countries which cannot build and maintain effective basic infrastructure are engineering and maintaining nuclear stockpiles.
- devoply 10y ago
  The world is not safe because we have not found a good ideology that makes the world safe and does not cause or perpetuate conflict. Guns don't kill people, people inspired by bad ideologies do.
  - mtberatwork 10y ago
    > Guns don't kill people, people inspired by bad ideologies do. I suppose that's down to one's own interpretation. Some food for thought: the !Kung tribe in Botswana credit the kill of an animal, not to the hunter, but to the arrow maker.
    - devoply 10y ago
      If that was your understanding of the world you might spend all of your time crafting your arrow to be just right. Rather than practicing to make sure that as a hunter you can make the arrow hit the proper target. And then blame your inability on your lack of finding the right sort of stone to make the arrow or something as such. Your definition and understanding of the problem determines the potential for solutions in finding solutions to the problem. Similarly there are places in the United States where everyone is armed, and yet very little violence happens. Maybe if everyone had all the nuclear weapons they could want, no wars could ever happen again which would be a good thing.
      - AbrahamParangi 10y ago
        What places were you thinking of? I was trying to find out what the actual statistics were and my cursory search led me to this paper http://crimeresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Firearm-Ownership-and-Violent-Crime.pdf http://crimeresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Firearm-... Highlight: These analyses do not support the hypothesis that firearm ownership deters violent firearm crime. Instead, this study shows that higher levels of firearm ownership are associated with higher rates of firearm-related violent crime. I looked up the journal and it seems to be reputable (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Journal_of_Preventive_Medicine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Journal_of_Preventive...), but I don't read medical studies often so I can't really tell.
laretluval 10y ago
The lesson I take away from these incidents is that MAD is highly robust to false positives.
paulpauper 10y ago
Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin confront a stark choice: begin another nuclear-arms race or reduce the threat of nuclear war. it would seem like the latter considering how close the two seem to be
adventured 10y ago
The shift back toward nationalism guarantees substantial new military conflicts will arise in the next few decades. The only question is how serious they'll be, not whether they'll happen. Nationalism vs globalism will come and go in cycles; we've been rapidly heading into an obvious nationalism cycle. That will see the raising of barriers, both physically and communication-wise between nations, increasing the odds of misunderstanding. The Eurozone is almost guaranteed to dissolve and it's likely the EU will struggle to retain its former scope. Russia and China will be more aggressive about annexing territory as the US pulls back from its formerly over-extended global military reach. The net result will be increased security fears and chaos for most other nations (not to mention greater military expenditures, which will damage most European welfare states and push Japan to the edge financially). The increase in nationalism is also guaranteed to result in a few new nuclear powers being born out of security fear (Brazil, Turkey and Saudi Arabia are three candidates).
- arca_vorago 10y ago
  I don't buy this line of reasoning or thinking whatsoever. I personally think it is the eroding of national sovereignty via supranational oligarchical globalism falsely touted as utopic globalism that has created these situations in the first place via blow-back piled on blow-back over time. Just because the British empire changed it's name to the "commonwealth" doesn't make it less of an empire. It is the meddling in the affairs of state of national governments that has created this instability, so don't try to sell me on globalism as a solution, because it's the problem. Now, don't misunderstand me, we do need to encourage more internationally geared solutions, but only sovereign nation states can come to those agreements through diplomacy. If you erode national sovereignty like the west has been doing, it's no wonder the world is so destabalized. Of course, I have sneaking suspicion that destabalization is sorta the point, but I digress. Nationalism: Devotion to the interests or culture of one's nation. The belief that nations will benefit from acting independently rather than collectively, emphasizing national rather than international goals. Aspirations for national independence in a country under foreign domination.
  - orf 10y ago
Pica_soO 10y ago
Deep, deep down everyone, who is not in it for the power alone, knows that there is a family he wants to go home too, and that the same goes for those on the other side. And even if the other side would take that from you- to take that, for forever- that is beyond insanity. Humans will not use this weapons.
- helloworld 10y ago
  I hope you're right, but I fear that nuclear weapons might someday be available to fanatics who make very different moral calculations.
  - arethuza 10y ago
    Based on historical records of the Cold War I think I could argue that nuclear weapons were available to fanatics - fortunately they were kept at bay by sensible political leadership! "Restraint? Why are you so concerned with saving their lives? The whole idea is to kill the bastards. At the end of the war if there are two Americans and one Russian left alive, we win!" That isn't from Dr Strangelove but an actual quote from General Power - head of SAC at the time of the Cuban crisis.
- red75prime 10y ago
  Yeah. Humans will not. That's why we have the Perimeter (15Э601). Dead hand retaliatory nuclear strike system. Not that I'm proud of it or anything, but this system exists.
- dskrvk 10y ago
  > In 2015, three launch officers at Malmstrom Air Force Base, in Montana, were dismissed for using illegal drugs, including ecstasy, cocaine, and amphetamines. That same year, a launch officer at Minot Air Force Base, in North Dakota, was sentenced to twenty-five years in prison for heading a violent street gang, distributing drugs, sexually assaulting a girl under the age of sixteen, and using psilocybin, a powerful hallucinogen. As the job title implies, launch officers are entrusted with the keys for launching intercontinental ballistic missiles. Are you sure? The point of the article is that even if humans won't willingly start a nuclear war, they are so used to the idea of nuclear weapons just sitting there, that they stopped fearing them and become careless. This may one day lead them to accidentally give, or to allow their automated systems to give, the launch command.
helloworld 10y ago
This part gave me a chill: The Royal Navy’s decision to save money by using Windows for Submarines, a version of Windows XP, as the operating system for its ballistic-missile subs seems especially shortsighted. Indeed!
- berkut 10y ago
  Type 45 destroyers are running modified Win2000 OS with a "realtime" kernel. Anyway, defence stuff takes ages to develop, test and go through "trials", so it's quite common the customer gets stuff seven or eight years after development started. In particular, the Astute sub development programme was started in 1997, the first one was laid down in 2001, and was with the RN in 2010, although there were four years of programme delay (as there nearly always is with defence programmes).
- tlb 10y ago
  Though the article seemed to suggest that using the latest-greatest fully-patched auto-updating version would be better. I'm sure that would be far worse. Especially against state actors who can corrupt the update channel. An air-gapped hardened Windows XP with all the optional services turned off is pretty robust.
  - rhizome 10y ago
    Any systems person worth their salary would turn off auto-update and distribute fixes via e.g. GPO or other in-house system update process.
- ScottBurson 10y ago
  Oh. My. Fucking. God. It is shocking to think that my home computer is probably running a newer version of Windows than the U.K.’s military submarines It is shocking to think that a military submarine is running any version of Windows.
Animats 10y ago
In some ways, the Soviet-era Perimetr system is a better solution. This is the infamous "Dead Hand" launch system. It's intended to allow a second strike if Moscow and the Russian general staff are both destroyed. It's normally on standby. When activated in a crisis, which the USSR did at least once, it provides a backup system to give launch authority to regional commanders if sensors indicate a nuclear detonation at Moscow, loss of communication with the usual launch authorities, and some amount of time has elapsed. This removes the temptation to launch on warning in a crisis. The US lacks that.
- nickff 10y ago
  The USA had an equivalent system, but used a different approach; "Operation Looking Glass" sent (hardened) command aircraft airborne 24/7 to provide continual command and control capabilities to silos and submarines, even in the event of a successful decapitation first strike.[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Looking_Glass https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Looking_Glass
coldcode 10y ago
The only people who win in a worldwide nuclear exchange are the immediate dead; everyone else loses. Why anyone in their right mind would even risk such a thing is beyond crazy. I also wonder what the benefit of doubling your nuclear capacity is if you already have enough to ensure worldwide destruction several times over?
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  The immediate dead obviously lose, too, even if by some metrics they lose less than others. That said, excess capacity has a plausible value if your threat model includes the potential of a surprise counterforce strike where you may not be able to identify the aggressor before the strike lands. In that case, excess capacity is essential to ensure that appropriate response caapcity survives any such strike. The fact that you have enough that, if it was all launched in an optimum distribution of targets to ensure maximum global distribution of damage it would kill the world multiple times over is irrelevant when you are planning for a threat model in which a substantial fraction of the capacity would be destroyed prior to launch.
- dogma1138 10y ago
  Depending on how large the exchange is; if only a few major metropolitan areas and some hardened military targets the world would be just fine. We've detonated close to 2500 nukes in testing; unless the US and Russia unleash their 20-30K arsenal all at once (the other powers are negligible at these amounts) there isn't going a massive global environmental effect. Infact even a fairly large depletion of the global nuclear arsenal is likely to produce little to no environmental global lasting effects. So unless your life is dependant on the real estate market in London, Berlin, Moscow, DC or NYC I think you just might want to live through a nuclear war unless you really are eager to die.
- tlb 10y ago
  Having more weapons is a more effective deterrent against an enemy who thinks he can destroy most of your weapons before launch. Suppose country A estimates it can destroy 90% of country B's weapons before launch in a first strike, and can spend $100B to get to 99%. It'd be highly motivated to do so. But if country B doubles its number of weapons, it would be beyond country A's resources to get to an acceptable level of destruction. That's one of many dynamics that causes arms races to go far beyond one weapon per target.

123 points by betolink 10y ago

An article very much on the same line as the author's book (and recent movie) on "Command and Control". A very good read by the way. On a side note, the title is poorly chosen - if a nuclear exchange occurs, it's not World War III, it's just "game over" for everyone. Even the few survivors would have a very harsh time just to endure the nuclear winters, lack of energy, no medical supplies and complete destruction of infrastructure and production capacities - even simply finding places to live without massive radiation contamination would be a serious challenge. I fear there would be historian to recount what would happen next.

themodelplumber 10y ago
I thought nuclear winters were found to be a myth? (A minor point of course)
- wwweston 10y ago
  How can they be a myth? Harsher winters from volcanic eruptions appear to be a historical fact. Nuclear explosions can kick up a huge storm of stuff into the atmosphere -- that's part of their point. Multiple explosions, multiple effects, likely similar enough to volcanic winters. Or worse, depending on the breadth of the exchange. And, of course, there's making massive amounts of the environment radioactive.
  - justin66 10y ago
    > Nuclear explosions can kick up a huge storm of stuff into the atmosphere -- that's part of their point. I've never read that. It's easy enough to do, but the (planned) usage of these weapons (outside of hitting the enemy's heavily hardened targets on the ground) tends to rely on airbursts. I don't remember either side relying on nuclear winter strategically. The logic of MAD is terrible enough to serve as a deterrent even without maximizing dust in the atmosphere. I remember the disarmament advocates warning of nuclear winter, and the warmongery types minimizing its liklihood.
    - intransigent 10y ago
      Well, the idea of global doomsday for all, beyond mere tactical retaliation, is probably drawn from the media, with movies like Dr. Stangelove playing the part of the primary narrative. As to how much any world power has actually strategized and mobilized resources toward such an end (deliberate global suicide that destroys both sides by design) is likely to never be fully revealed, since it's a slightly alarming idea. Even so, some of the plans that have been revealed really are quite terrible. Bad enough, that the difference between deliberate and accidental nuclear winters could be considered an argument that splits hairs.
- sehugg 10y ago
  No, it's even worse than we thought back then. Recent research predicts even a regional nuclear exchange could create global famine conditions for years (not to mention the political and economic instability): http://www.ippnw.org/nuclear-famine.html http://www.ippnw.org/nuclear-famine.html
prodmerc 10y ago
Depends on the nuclear players involved. If it's just the US and Russia (for whatever reason), plenty of the world will survive. Seems that people disagree on how many detonations in what places would be necessary for a serious and long nuclear winter. An all out nuclear world war (the reasons for which I could not begin to comprehend), then it's game over.
- arethuza 10y ago
  I'm pretty sure that even if it was just a US and Russia thing that some places in the UK would be hit - the Fylingdales BMEWS site, possibly the UK Trident facilities on the Clyde.
  - SalimoS 10y ago
    I'm pretty sure that Africa won't get touched
- ekianjo 10y ago
  The US and Russia would target each other allies' as well.

saycheese 10y ago

Interesting to me how people fear nuclear power, but seem indifferent to the threat of nuclear war. While it's hard to know, given the degree of secrecy on the topic, once ran across a reference to how what are now Russia's nuke systems could automatically be triggered; if this is still true, in my opinion, this is would be the most likely source of global thermonuclear war. "Only way to win is not to play."

ErikVandeWater 10y ago
"... or be on mars." -Elon
- saycheese 10y ago
  Very likely that anyone on Mars would still be very dependent on Earth to survive until proven otherwise; at that point, it wouldn't be surprising if, as a control, nuclear countermeasures were deploy to insure Mars was at just as much risk.
- canadian_voter 10y ago
  Or how about we set up a Mars colony, and do all of our wars there? Seems somehow appropriate. We can nuke the hell out of Mars and everyone on Earth will be fine. And what makes people think that in the event of global thermonuclear war that Mars will escape unscathed? Absolute ridiculous nonsense. The solution here is not to run away, it's to confront the problem directly. I never understood how anyone could think that "Earth is so messed up, with so many problems, it's just easier to colonize Mars." Earth is PERFECT for human beings to live on. Let's make it work.
  - saycheese 10y ago
    * Earth as a singular point of failure is not optimal.
- vectorpush 10y ago
  An irradiated post-nuclear Earth is far more hospitable to life than Mars.

conistonwater 10y ago

I feel like there's a general puzzle here about statistics and decision theory: if the penalty for basing a bad decision on a false alarm is so high, does that mean that every alarm should be treated as a false alarm? And in that case, if you are resolved not to trust your sensors, what's the point of installing sensors in the first place?

rtpg 10y ago
I feel like this is the sort of thing that comes up a lot in business in general. You have some strong signal about something, but it's usually hard to take anything as gospel. Instead, you take it as a datapoint and investigate further. You can try treating every alarm as a false alarm (because, historically, nuclear wars have never been started), but still investigate what is happening. The alarm isn't useless, just not decisive.
beejiu 10y ago
Game theory is probably more relevant in the nuclear war scenario.
- marcosdumay 10y ago
  The most interesting part is that no party wins anything by retaliating, only loses more. It must be very interesting how this fact in included on strategies.
  - tlb 10y ago
    Not true. If country A launches a fraction of its missiles, country B has a motivation to launch tactical missiles towards A's launch sites to prevent them launching more. And you never want to launch all your missiles, because then you have no bargaining power. So any nuclear conflict is likely to involve several exchanges.
- eli_gottlieb 10y ago
  Game theory applies to rational, intelligent agents. In real life, unfortunately, the people with their fingers on the nuclear buttons are fanatical idiots these days. And no, I'm not just referring to the one in my own country.

rrggrr 10y ago

Is rhetoric the real problem, or is it nuclear proliferation? Schlosser's book, which I've read and much admire, makes the point that nuclear stewardship is insanely difficult. If the world is less safe its because where there were once two nuclear powers, there are now between nine and twelve depending whom you ask. Rhetoric is the least of the world's concerns when countries which cannot build and maintain effective basic infrastructure are engineering and maintaining nuclear stockpiles.

devoply 10y ago
The world is not safe because we have not found a good ideology that makes the world safe and does not cause or perpetuate conflict. Guns don't kill people, people inspired by bad ideologies do.
- mtberatwork 10y ago
  > Guns don't kill people, people inspired by bad ideologies do. I suppose that's down to one's own interpretation. Some food for thought: the !Kung tribe in Botswana credit the kill of an animal, not to the hunter, but to the arrow maker.
  - devoply 10y ago
    If that was your understanding of the world you might spend all of your time crafting your arrow to be just right. Rather than practicing to make sure that as a hunter you can make the arrow hit the proper target. And then blame your inability on your lack of finding the right sort of stone to make the arrow or something as such. Your definition and understanding of the problem determines the potential for solutions in finding solutions to the problem. Similarly there are places in the United States where everyone is armed, and yet very little violence happens. Maybe if everyone had all the nuclear weapons they could want, no wars could ever happen again which would be a good thing.
    - AbrahamParangi 10y ago
      What places were you thinking of? I was trying to find out what the actual statistics were and my cursory search led me to this paper http://crimeresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Firearm-Ownership-and-Violent-Crime.pdf http://crimeresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Firearm-... Highlight: These analyses do not support the hypothesis that firearm ownership deters violent firearm crime. Instead, this study shows that higher levels of firearm ownership are associated with higher rates of firearm-related violent crime. I looked up the journal and it seems to be reputable (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Journal_of_Preventive_Medicine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Journal_of_Preventive...), but I don't read medical studies often so I can't really tell.

laretluval 10y ago

The lesson I take away from these incidents is that MAD is highly robust to false positives.

paulpauper 10y ago

Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin confront a stark choice: begin another nuclear-arms race or reduce the threat of nuclear war. it would seem like the latter considering how close the two seem to be

adventured 10y ago

The shift back toward nationalism guarantees substantial new military conflicts will arise in the next few decades. The only question is how serious they'll be, not whether they'll happen. Nationalism vs globalism will come and go in cycles; we've been rapidly heading into an obvious nationalism cycle. That will see the raising of barriers, both physically and communication-wise between nations, increasing the odds of misunderstanding. The Eurozone is almost guaranteed to dissolve and it's likely the EU will struggle to retain its former scope. Russia and China will be more aggressive about annexing territory as the US pulls back from its formerly over-extended global military reach. The net result will be increased security fears and chaos for most other nations (not to mention greater military expenditures, which will damage most European welfare states and push Japan to the edge financially). The increase in nationalism is also guaranteed to result in a few new nuclear powers being born out of security fear (Brazil, Turkey and Saudi Arabia are three candidates).

arca_vorago 10y ago
I don't buy this line of reasoning or thinking whatsoever. I personally think it is the eroding of national sovereignty via supranational oligarchical globalism falsely touted as utopic globalism that has created these situations in the first place via blow-back piled on blow-back over time. Just because the British empire changed it's name to the "commonwealth" doesn't make it less of an empire. It is the meddling in the affairs of state of national governments that has created this instability, so don't try to sell me on globalism as a solution, because it's the problem. Now, don't misunderstand me, we do need to encourage more internationally geared solutions, but only sovereign nation states can come to those agreements through diplomacy. If you erode national sovereignty like the west has been doing, it's no wonder the world is so destabalized. Of course, I have sneaking suspicion that destabalization is sorta the point, but I digress. Nationalism: Devotion to the interests or culture of one's nation. The belief that nations will benefit from acting independently rather than collectively, emphasizing national rather than international goals. Aspirations for national independence in a country under foreign domination.
- orf 10y ago

Pica_soO 10y ago

Deep, deep down everyone, who is not in it for the power alone, knows that there is a family he wants to go home too, and that the same goes for those on the other side. And even if the other side would take that from you- to take that, for forever- that is beyond insanity. Humans will not use this weapons.

helloworld 10y ago
I hope you're right, but I fear that nuclear weapons might someday be available to fanatics who make very different moral calculations.
- arethuza 10y ago
  Based on historical records of the Cold War I think I could argue that nuclear weapons were available to fanatics - fortunately they were kept at bay by sensible political leadership! "Restraint? Why are you so concerned with saving their lives? The whole idea is to kill the bastards. At the end of the war if there are two Americans and one Russian left alive, we win!" That isn't from Dr Strangelove but an actual quote from General Power - head of SAC at the time of the Cuban crisis.
red75prime 10y ago
Yeah. Humans will not. That's why we have the Perimeter (15Э601). Dead hand retaliatory nuclear strike system. Not that I'm proud of it or anything, but this system exists.
dskrvk 10y ago
> In 2015, three launch officers at Malmstrom Air Force Base, in Montana, were dismissed for using illegal drugs, including ecstasy, cocaine, and amphetamines. That same year, a launch officer at Minot Air Force Base, in North Dakota, was sentenced to twenty-five years in prison for heading a violent street gang, distributing drugs, sexually assaulting a girl under the age of sixteen, and using psilocybin, a powerful hallucinogen. As the job title implies, launch officers are entrusted with the keys for launching intercontinental ballistic missiles. Are you sure? The point of the article is that even if humans won't willingly start a nuclear war, they are so used to the idea of nuclear weapons just sitting there, that they stopped fearing them and become careless. This may one day lead them to accidentally give, or to allow their automated systems to give, the launch command.

helloworld 10y ago

This part gave me a chill: The Royal Navy’s decision to save money by using Windows for Submarines, a version of Windows XP, as the operating system for its ballistic-missile subs seems especially shortsighted. Indeed!

berkut 10y ago
Type 45 destroyers are running modified Win2000 OS with a "realtime" kernel. Anyway, defence stuff takes ages to develop, test and go through "trials", so it's quite common the customer gets stuff seven or eight years after development started. In particular, the Astute sub development programme was started in 1997, the first one was laid down in 2001, and was with the RN in 2010, although there were four years of programme delay (as there nearly always is with defence programmes).
tlb 10y ago
Though the article seemed to suggest that using the latest-greatest fully-patched auto-updating version would be better. I'm sure that would be far worse. Especially against state actors who can corrupt the update channel. An air-gapped hardened Windows XP with all the optional services turned off is pretty robust.
- rhizome 10y ago
  Any systems person worth their salary would turn off auto-update and distribute fixes via e.g. GPO or other in-house system update process.
ScottBurson 10y ago
Oh. My. Fucking. God. It is shocking to think that my home computer is probably running a newer version of Windows than the U.K.’s military submarines It is shocking to think that a military submarine is running any version of Windows.

Animats 10y ago

In some ways, the Soviet-era Perimetr system is a better solution. This is the infamous "Dead Hand" launch system. It's intended to allow a second strike if Moscow and the Russian general staff are both destroyed. It's normally on standby. When activated in a crisis, which the USSR did at least once, it provides a backup system to give launch authority to regional commanders if sensors indicate a nuclear detonation at Moscow, loss of communication with the usual launch authorities, and some amount of time has elapsed. This removes the temptation to launch on warning in a crisis. The US lacks that.

nickff 10y ago
The USA had an equivalent system, but used a different approach; "Operation Looking Glass" sent (hardened) command aircraft airborne 24/7 to provide continual command and control capabilities to silos and submarines, even in the event of a successful decapitation first strike.[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Looking_Glass https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Looking_Glass

coldcode 10y ago

The only people who win in a worldwide nuclear exchange are the immediate dead; everyone else loses. Why anyone in their right mind would even risk such a thing is beyond crazy. I also wonder what the benefit of doubling your nuclear capacity is if you already have enough to ensure worldwide destruction several times over?

dragonwriter 10y ago
The immediate dead obviously lose, too, even if by some metrics they lose less than others. That said, excess capacity has a plausible value if your threat model includes the potential of a surprise counterforce strike where you may not be able to identify the aggressor before the strike lands. In that case, excess capacity is essential to ensure that appropriate response caapcity survives any such strike. The fact that you have enough that, if it was all launched in an optimum distribution of targets to ensure maximum global distribution of damage it would kill the world multiple times over is irrelevant when you are planning for a threat model in which a substantial fraction of the capacity would be destroyed prior to launch.
dogma1138 10y ago
Depending on how large the exchange is; if only a few major metropolitan areas and some hardened military targets the world would be just fine. We've detonated close to 2500 nukes in testing; unless the US and Russia unleash their 20-30K arsenal all at once (the other powers are negligible at these amounts) there isn't going a massive global environmental effect. Infact even a fairly large depletion of the global nuclear arsenal is likely to produce little to no environmental global lasting effects. So unless your life is dependant on the real estate market in London, Berlin, Moscow, DC or NYC I think you just might want to live through a nuclear war unless you really are eager to die.
tlb 10y ago
Having more weapons is a more effective deterrent against an enemy who thinks he can destroy most of your weapons before launch. Suppose country A estimates it can destroy 90% of country B's weapons before launch in a first strike, and can spend $100B to get to 99%. It'd be highly motivated to do so. But if country B doubles its number of weapons, it would be beyond country A's resources to get to an acceptable level of destruction. That's one of many dynamics that causes arms races to go far beyond one weapon per target.