7 ms·

I'm not terrified because I don't think Bill Perry is really terrified either, in his own words from the article: >“I do not think it is a probability this yea

I'm not terrified because I don't think Bill Perry is really terrified either, in his own words from the article: >“I do not think it is a probability this year or next year or anytime in the foreseeable future. But the consequence is so great, we have to take it seriously. And there are things to greatly lower those possibilities that we’re simply not doing.” A nuclear catastrophe, statistically, poses a much lower risk to my well being than tornado season. Also occasional flash flooding, especially while driving. Oh, and extremely dry summers with little rain that make for wildfire conditions. Also, there's heat stroke if I'm being active...I guess what I mean is I do believe, deep down, that there are people who genuinely care and will work on such serious matters. Serious people who take things seriously. I applaud them and hope my tax dollars support them appropriately, public and/or private sector. Sort of like geologists working to study the devastating potential of fault lines or volcanic activity. After seeing what extreme weather can do, and how resilient the US population seems to be, I'm honestly grateful to not have to have "Duck and Cover" as part of my everyday psyche.

saboot 10y ago
Did you read the entire article? He makes a point to discuss expectation values as the metric to judge the seriousness of addressing a nuclear event, not the statistical probability value > Perry wishes more people were familiar with the concept of “expected value.” That is a statistical way of understanding events of very large magnitude that have a low probability. The large magnitude event could be something good, like winning a lottery ticket. Or it could be something bad, like a nuclear bomb exploding. Because the odds of winning the lottery are so low, the rational thing is to save your money and not buy the ticket. As for a nuclear explosion, by Perry’s lights, the consequences are so grave that the rational thing would be for people in the United States and everywhere to be in a state of peak alarm about their vulnerability, and for political debate to be dominated by discussion of how to reduce the risk.
- mcguire 10y ago
  Expected value breaks down with what I like to think of as the Pascal's wager fallacy: if you consider the consequences effectively infinite, any positive probability means you should think about nothing else. It took a long time to get to the article's actual suggestions (eliminate all ICBMS?); until that, this was just fear mongering.
lintiness 10y ago
the historical occurrences of nuclear device detonation have nothing whatsoever to do with the chances they will be used going forward. i find his paranoia political. we should be a lot more worried about india and pakistan having nuclear weapons than a president who uses twitter.
- saboot 10y ago
  Dismissive comments like these miss Perry's concerns entirely. We've been on this sleepwalk towards increasing nuclear risk long before Trump. There are many existing risks which are still inadequately addressed. Loose material being acquired by terrorists, North Korea, a Russia more openly using nuclear weapons as a threat (installing nuclear capable missiles in Kaliningrad as we speak!), the previous $1 Trillion US nuclear modernization program which while addresses many safety concerns introduces new tactical capabilities for weapons packages making them more usable. He speaks out for concern on all of the above. The article states he hopes to meet with Trump & Mattis to work with him and give his advice.
  - lintiness 10y ago
    my comment was to previous poster who used historical detonations as somehow predictive statistically. it isn't. as to whether we should be concerned, where was this article five months ago? it's thinly veiled political commentary.
    - saboot 10y ago
      Perry has been speaking about this for many years. http://www.wjperryproject.org/ http://www.wjperryproject.org/ If you want to disagree with him, then give an argument. However if you want to do a quick smear and dodge then keep repeating that it's "thinly veiled political commentary" over and over again.
    - jat850 10y ago
      Five months ago, there wasn't an increased vocalized threat of risk towards, for example, the Iran nuclear deal, or vocalized suggestions of nuclear arms proliferation increasing. There is new information now, and that needs to be factored into level of concern. Of course it's political, but that doesn't excuse new information from having an impact on risk assessment.
mikeash 10y ago
Are you sure the risk from tornadoes is higher? It looks like the odds of sustaining an injury or being killed by a tornado are somewhat under 0.1% per year for residents of Tornado Alley, and you can greatly reduce that for yourself with some simple precautions. I would guess that the risk of a nuclear holocaust is 0.1% per year or more, and there is nothing you can do to reduce the risk of it happening to you. (There are things you can do to increase your odds of survival and improve your likely position afterwards, but you will be severely impacted no matter what.)
- pc86 10y ago
  > I would guess that the risk of a nuclear holocaust is 0.1% per year or more > I would guess Based on what? Unless it's based on something similar to where you got the 0.1% risk for a tornado it's no more accurate a guess than if you had said 0.01% or 1% or 80%.
  - mikeash 10y ago
    Based on my understanding of the situation, and in particular based on several incidents over the past six decades where it was narrowly averted in situations where a few people having a bad day could have made it happen. I'm not making any claim to accuracy. That's why I used the word "guess." Note that the comment I replied to implies that the risk of a nuclear holocaust is "much lower" than 0.1% per year. Why aren't you hassling them about that claim too? Unlike me, they just stated it as if it were a plain fact.
  - peatmoss 10y ago
    He's a Bayesian, and his priors are predicated on the belief that the lack of apparent intelligent life in the universe is attributable to self-annihilation. In all seriousness, calculating a probability of death from nuclear calamity isn't going to be possible without a great number of caveats and assumptions. It isn't like a meteor strike, because we at least have some record of that stretching back a long time. It's also not like meteor strikes because I believe the disaster generating process (people with buttons wired to faulty / hackable control systems) to be a giant mess of scary.
  - 10y ago
cocoablazing 10y ago
Two serious fallacies here: 1) The risk posed by nuclear war is correlated across nearly every individual, so the odds ratio between risks posed to you as an individual and nuclear war is of no use to the practice of risk management in such policy matters. 2) You are comparing the study of things entirely outside our control (volcanos), and potential doom which is entirely of our own making, towards the end of maintaining control by holding the world under the constant threat of annihilation.
kevin_nisbet 10y ago
I'm not sure that I entirely agree with this assessment. One of the very interesting things I got out of reading Command And Control by Eric Schlosser, was the number of very severe accidents that have happened in the US in the handling of nuclear weapons. While probably somewhat overstated, to me it basically makes a case that the US is lucky it hasn't nuked itself by accident (and some of the stories told in that book are incredible, I enjoyed that book). Also, some of the stories make the case about how abysmal the care and prudence was around handling these weapons, such as the reluctance for years to even put codes on the weapons, or when they were forced to, setting every code to 0000. While I do believe the attitude may have changed, I don't know that it's prudent to put unwavering faith into the people handling these arms, based on what's told in this book. While I don't want to say you suffer from this, I've seen what I believe to be a miss-allocation of risk in some of the engineering roles I've worked at. What I mean by this, is that because an event hasn't happened, or hasn't happened recently, that we believe the risk has changed. I've literally been part of a discussion on why do we need backups, because we've never restored from one. If I understand correctly, this was the sort of philosophy that led to the challenger explosion, we launched the rocket before and it didn't explode, so why would it happen this time. To me, this is a fallacy of risk, previous events or recent history don't change the risk. So while you're right, the risk that a nuclear accident happens, compared to a tornado or flooding happening is much different, doesn't mean that a nuclear accident won't happen. I also highly suspect, that if a nuclear armed country accidentally nukes itself, it would grip the world in a much different way than any tornado or flood. And may change your well-being in very dramatic way's, especially if one doesn't realize it was even an accident to begin with. edit: minor grammatical mistakes
- caf 10y ago
  Also recommended reading is The Dead Hand by David E Hoffman.
- acqq 10y ago
  The details about the zeroes: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/12/launch-code-for-us-nukes-was-00000000-for-20-years/ http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/12/launch-code-for-u... "Launch code for US nukes was 00000000 for 20 years" http://foreignpolicy.com/2014/01/21/air-force-swears-our-nuke-launch-code-was-never-00000000/ http://foreignpolicy.com/2014/01/21/air-force-swears-our-nuk... So it was not actually eight zeros (or four) but apparently 6 zeroes (000000) and effectively the "key under the doormat" (in the safe with the key in the same base as the rocket, the opposite of what was claimed then). The procedure was more complex than just keying in zeroes, but everything was surely trained on the rehearsals. Now, imagine somebody just and only once forgets to apply the "it's just a rehearsal" command. What's the "acceptable" probability some city being successfully targeted, even only and just once, especially knowing that it can trigger the retaliation? The logic of the nuclear war is: "if the rockets come to you, you have to send yours to them, because otherwise they won!" -- they think it's better that the civilization gets wiped out than to appear to be a "chicken." Even a kind of semi-automated response surely exists.
icantdrive55 10y ago
Besides my families well being, I'm terrified I won't have the money to rebuild my meager home after a catastrophe. I read my homeowner's policy every few years, and it's for all practical purposes worthless. I keep it out of tradition. It literally covers less, and less each year. As it stands now, my home would have to burn down for it to kick in. Fires where I live just don't happen. Plus, houses just don't burn down like they used to. I feel my family has a good chance of surviving a catastrophe. We wouldn't make it homeless though. (I'm really wondering why I keep paying that huge premium each year. I wish our representatives would demand better coverage from insurance companies. It seems like the biggest racket going?)
huherto 10y ago
> A nuclear catastrophe, statistically, poses a much lower risk to my well being than tornado season. The probability may be lower. But the consequences are way, way, way, way, way bigger.(I am assuming nuclear catastrophe means nuclear war.) From a personal point of view. A heart attack or cancer it is much bigger risk. You die and the world ends for you. But from the point of view of humanity. A nuclear war it is a much higher risk, since it would jeopardize our future.

saboot 10y ago

Did you read the entire article? He makes a point to discuss expectation values as the metric to judge the seriousness of addressing a nuclear event, not the statistical probability value > Perry wishes more people were familiar with the concept of “expected value.” That is a statistical way of understanding events of very large magnitude that have a low probability. The large magnitude event could be something good, like winning a lottery ticket. Or it could be something bad, like a nuclear bomb exploding. Because the odds of winning the lottery are so low, the rational thing is to save your money and not buy the ticket. As for a nuclear explosion, by Perry’s lights, the consequences are so grave that the rational thing would be for people in the United States and everywhere to be in a state of peak alarm about their vulnerability, and for political debate to be dominated by discussion of how to reduce the risk.

mcguire 10y ago
Expected value breaks down with what I like to think of as the Pascal's wager fallacy: if you consider the consequences effectively infinite, any positive probability means you should think about nothing else. It took a long time to get to the article's actual suggestions (eliminate all ICBMS?); until that, this was just fear mongering.

lintiness 10y ago

the historical occurrences of nuclear device detonation have nothing whatsoever to do with the chances they will be used going forward. i find his paranoia political. we should be a lot more worried about india and pakistan having nuclear weapons than a president who uses twitter.

saboot 10y ago
Dismissive comments like these miss Perry's concerns entirely. We've been on this sleepwalk towards increasing nuclear risk long before Trump. There are many existing risks which are still inadequately addressed. Loose material being acquired by terrorists, North Korea, a Russia more openly using nuclear weapons as a threat (installing nuclear capable missiles in Kaliningrad as we speak!), the previous $1 Trillion US nuclear modernization program which while addresses many safety concerns introduces new tactical capabilities for weapons packages making them more usable. He speaks out for concern on all of the above. The article states he hopes to meet with Trump & Mattis to work with him and give his advice.
- lintiness 10y ago
  my comment was to previous poster who used historical detonations as somehow predictive statistically. it isn't. as to whether we should be concerned, where was this article five months ago? it's thinly veiled political commentary.
  - saboot 10y ago
    Perry has been speaking about this for many years. http://www.wjperryproject.org/ http://www.wjperryproject.org/ If you want to disagree with him, then give an argument. However if you want to do a quick smear and dodge then keep repeating that it's "thinly veiled political commentary" over and over again.
  - jat850 10y ago
    Five months ago, there wasn't an increased vocalized threat of risk towards, for example, the Iran nuclear deal, or vocalized suggestions of nuclear arms proliferation increasing. There is new information now, and that needs to be factored into level of concern. Of course it's political, but that doesn't excuse new information from having an impact on risk assessment.

mikeash 10y ago

Are you sure the risk from tornadoes is higher? It looks like the odds of sustaining an injury or being killed by a tornado are somewhat under 0.1% per year for residents of Tornado Alley, and you can greatly reduce that for yourself with some simple precautions. I would guess that the risk of a nuclear holocaust is 0.1% per year or more, and there is nothing you can do to reduce the risk of it happening to you. (There are things you can do to increase your odds of survival and improve your likely position afterwards, but you will be severely impacted no matter what.)

pc86 10y ago
> I would guess that the risk of a nuclear holocaust is 0.1% per year or more > I would guess Based on what? Unless it's based on something similar to where you got the 0.1% risk for a tornado it's no more accurate a guess than if you had said 0.01% or 1% or 80%.
- mikeash 10y ago
  Based on my understanding of the situation, and in particular based on several incidents over the past six decades where it was narrowly averted in situations where a few people having a bad day could have made it happen. I'm not making any claim to accuracy. That's why I used the word "guess." Note that the comment I replied to implies that the risk of a nuclear holocaust is "much lower" than 0.1% per year. Why aren't you hassling them about that claim too? Unlike me, they just stated it as if it were a plain fact.
- peatmoss 10y ago
  He's a Bayesian, and his priors are predicated on the belief that the lack of apparent intelligent life in the universe is attributable to self-annihilation. In all seriousness, calculating a probability of death from nuclear calamity isn't going to be possible without a great number of caveats and assumptions. It isn't like a meteor strike, because we at least have some record of that stretching back a long time. It's also not like meteor strikes because I believe the disaster generating process (people with buttons wired to faulty / hackable control systems) to be a giant mess of scary.
- 10y ago

cocoablazing 10y ago

Two serious fallacies here: 1) The risk posed by nuclear war is correlated across nearly every individual, so the odds ratio between risks posed to you as an individual and nuclear war is of no use to the practice of risk management in such policy matters. 2) You are comparing the study of things entirely outside our control (volcanos), and potential doom which is entirely of our own making, towards the end of maintaining control by holding the world under the constant threat of annihilation.

kevin_nisbet 10y ago

I'm not sure that I entirely agree with this assessment. One of the very interesting things I got out of reading Command And Control by Eric Schlosser, was the number of very severe accidents that have happened in the US in the handling of nuclear weapons. While probably somewhat overstated, to me it basically makes a case that the US is lucky it hasn't nuked itself by accident (and some of the stories told in that book are incredible, I enjoyed that book). Also, some of the stories make the case about how abysmal the care and prudence was around handling these weapons, such as the reluctance for years to even put codes on the weapons, or when they were forced to, setting every code to 0000. While I do believe the attitude may have changed, I don't know that it's prudent to put unwavering faith into the people handling these arms, based on what's told in this book. While I don't want to say you suffer from this, I've seen what I believe to be a miss-allocation of risk in some of the engineering roles I've worked at. What I mean by this, is that because an event hasn't happened, or hasn't happened recently, that we believe the risk has changed. I've literally been part of a discussion on why do we need backups, because we've never restored from one. If I understand correctly, this was the sort of philosophy that led to the challenger explosion, we launched the rocket before and it didn't explode, so why would it happen this time. To me, this is a fallacy of risk, previous events or recent history don't change the risk. So while you're right, the risk that a nuclear accident happens, compared to a tornado or flooding happening is much different, doesn't mean that a nuclear accident won't happen. I also highly suspect, that if a nuclear armed country accidentally nukes itself, it would grip the world in a much different way than any tornado or flood. And may change your well-being in very dramatic way's, especially if one doesn't realize it was even an accident to begin with. edit: minor grammatical mistakes

caf 10y ago
Also recommended reading is The Dead Hand by David E Hoffman.
acqq 10y ago
The details about the zeroes: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/12/launch-code-for-us-nukes-was-00000000-for-20-years/ http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/12/launch-code-for-u... "Launch code for US nukes was 00000000 for 20 years" http://foreignpolicy.com/2014/01/21/air-force-swears-our-nuke-launch-code-was-never-00000000/ http://foreignpolicy.com/2014/01/21/air-force-swears-our-nuk... So it was not actually eight zeros (or four) but apparently 6 zeroes (000000) and effectively the "key under the doormat" (in the safe with the key in the same base as the rocket, the opposite of what was claimed then). The procedure was more complex than just keying in zeroes, but everything was surely trained on the rehearsals. Now, imagine somebody just and only once forgets to apply the "it's just a rehearsal" command. What's the "acceptable" probability some city being successfully targeted, even only and just once, especially knowing that it can trigger the retaliation? The logic of the nuclear war is: "if the rockets come to you, you have to send yours to them, because otherwise they won!" -- they think it's better that the civilization gets wiped out than to appear to be a "chicken." Even a kind of semi-automated response surely exists.

icantdrive55 10y ago

Besides my families well being, I'm terrified I won't have the money to rebuild my meager home after a catastrophe. I read my homeowner's policy every few years, and it's for all practical purposes worthless. I keep it out of tradition. It literally covers less, and less each year. As it stands now, my home would have to burn down for it to kick in. Fires where I live just don't happen. Plus, houses just don't burn down like they used to. I feel my family has a good chance of surviving a catastrophe. We wouldn't make it homeless though. (I'm really wondering why I keep paying that huge premium each year. I wish our representatives would demand better coverage from insurance companies. It seems like the biggest racket going?)

huherto 10y ago

> A nuclear catastrophe, statistically, poses a much lower risk to my well being than tornado season. The probability may be lower. But the consequences are way, way, way, way, way bigger.(I am assuming nuclear catastrophe means nuclear war.) From a personal point of view. A heart attack or cancer it is much bigger risk. You die and the world ends for you. But from the point of view of humanity. A nuclear war it is a much higher risk, since it would jeopardize our future.