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> why would all the missiles be launched towards everywhere? Because that's the way nuclear deterrent theory works. If you collapse the game theory calculus d
by ethbro 7y ago
> why would all the missiles be launched towards everywhere?
Because that's the way nuclear deterrent theory works.
If you collapse the game theory calculus down, it turns into "Any technology or action that makes it less likely an adversary will respond with an unacceptable counterstrike on me makes it more likely that I will consider a first strike a viable option."
Examples of technologies or activities with this result: missile defense, hypersonic reentry vehicles, hard target capable systems, smaller / tactical-sized warheads, launch site or attacker obfuscation.
Raising the likelihood that in the event anything happens to me I will ensure an unacceptable number of nukes are delivered to your country is one of the easier ways of ensuring deterrence and making the entire business unpalatable.
Nobody wants to destroy the world. But it's in everyone's interest to make everyone else think they're absolutely willing-to and capable-of, in the event they're strategically attacked.
- perl4ever 7y ago"Because that's the way nuclear deterrent theory works." The theory is that the US has committed to blowing up...Japan, say...if North Korea should succeed in missiling San Francisco?
- perl4ever 7y ago...consider that Nevada has been nuked (I just looked it up) a hundred times - and that's just above ground testing.
- ethbro 7y agoSee point on attribution. How do we know the weapons originated from North Korea, and not Japan, or the UK, or some other unlikely source? Because we saw the missile radar tracks? What if it was a shipping container or UUV bomb? This is why huge sums of money have been spent on post-detonation nuclear fingerprinting with high accuracy. Absent a high likelihood of correctly attributing the source, one must default to retaliating against everyone. Only once one establishes a credible belief in an adversary that the true source will likely be discovered can one relax policy to retaliation only against the source (and probably its allies).
- perl4ever 7y agoYou're saying that assuming a nuke goes off and nobody knows where it came from, that logic dictates the US or anyone else will nuke the whole world. I utterly don't believe that this is a thing that is planned or arranged to happen.
- ethbro 7y agoYou're arguing the same point in another thread, and we're talking about two different things there too. You're making a moral argument for why it shouldn't be so. I'm making an ammoral, logical argument for why it should.
- perl4ever 7y agoNo, I wasn't making a moral argument. I was talking about facts as I see them - I don't believe that the US or anyone else will blow up the world in response to being nuked. That is based on my thinking the game theory logic doesn't hold together and never has, but also historical events that indicate it was definitely invalid as of sometime in the 1960s.
- DuskStar 7y agoThe theory is that the US has committed to ruining things for everyone if bad things happen to them. Otherwise, hostile countries would have an incentive to create false flag attacks, or to incite an enemy to attack in truth. But if Iran knows that North Korea nuking DC means that they get nuked too (along with essentially everyone else on the planet), there's less incentive to make it happen. Same goes for Russia/China - wouldn't either of them 'love' a world where the US got in a nuclear exchange with the other? No more competition!