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Would the Reagan administration really allow a doomsday device gap? Think about it.

alehlopeh 5y ago
It’s funny how the presence of the last sentence changes the vibe of your comment from “well-intentioned question implicitly asking the reader to give it some thought” to “crazy talk coming from a conspiracy-theorist.”
motoboi 5y ago
America has one.
- evo 5y ago
  Historically, I think the answer is even scarier: the Dead Hand system presupposes that a centralized power is necessary to start nuclear war, the American system has been to delegate that power to regional and even theater-level military commanders (particularly in the bomber days, when sending orders to the Pacific theater was never going to work in the necessary timescale). It makes sense from a game theory perspective--if the commander-in-chief was literally the only person with strategic command authority, an assassination could render the entire country vulnerable to an unopposed first strike. An airfield on the northern edge of Japan is close enough to Russian airspace that, at alert, the local airfield commander was going to have to make the call to sortie their bombers while the runways were still intact, and once deployed it wasn't unimaginable that a Dr. Strangelove-style scenario could go down. It's been a few years, but I think this was mostly detailed in The Doomsday Machine by Daniel Ellsberg.
aerostable_slug 5y ago
They didn't. Various mobile nuclear C3 assets were created and/or modernized, GWEN was started, etc. We didn't need the precise equivalent because we chose a different route: redundant mobile command assets and a great deal of effort into preserving the Presidency (the office, not the person) at least until the combatant commanders had launch authority delegated to them. FWIW, the US used to have launch code broadcast rockets. The early ones were housed in dedicated sounding rockets. Later, radio "warheads" were secretly dispersed among the Minuteman fields. We no longer use them because there are enough reliable nodes to get the word out even while under attack (e.g. Milstar). Fun fact: missile command centers fitted to support the command rockets had a voice console where a crew member would read the current go codes into a microphone to be recorded on the "warhead" just before launch. Try not to stutter!

It’s funny how the presence of the last sentence changes the vibe of your comment from “well-intentioned question implicitly asking the reader to give it some thought” to “crazy talk coming from a conspiracy-theorist.”

motoboi 5y ago

America has one.

evo 5y ago
Historically, I think the answer is even scarier: the Dead Hand system presupposes that a centralized power is necessary to start nuclear war, the American system has been to delegate that power to regional and even theater-level military commanders (particularly in the bomber days, when sending orders to the Pacific theater was never going to work in the necessary timescale). It makes sense from a game theory perspective--if the commander-in-chief was literally the only person with strategic command authority, an assassination could render the entire country vulnerable to an unopposed first strike. An airfield on the northern edge of Japan is close enough to Russian airspace that, at alert, the local airfield commander was going to have to make the call to sortie their bombers while the runways were still intact, and once deployed it wasn't unimaginable that a Dr. Strangelove-style scenario could go down. It's been a few years, but I think this was mostly detailed in The Doomsday Machine by Daniel Ellsberg.

aerostable_slug 5y ago

They didn't. Various mobile nuclear C3 assets were created and/or modernized, GWEN was started, etc. We didn't need the precise equivalent because we chose a different route: redundant mobile command assets and a great deal of effort into preserving the Presidency (the office, not the person) at least until the combatant commanders had launch authority delegated to them. FWIW, the US used to have launch code broadcast rockets. The early ones were housed in dedicated sounding rockets. Later, radio "warheads" were secretly dispersed among the Minuteman fields. We no longer use them because there are enough reliable nodes to get the word out even while under attack (e.g. Milstar). Fun fact: missile command centers fitted to support the command rockets had a voice console where a crew member would read the current go codes into a microphone to be recorded on the "warhead" just before launch. Try not to stutter!