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> Contrary to a lot of people I know, I think nuclear weapons are largely a good thing and the reason we‘ve had peace in Europe for 80 years. I think the verdi

> Contrary to a lot of people I know, I think nuclear weapons are largely a good thing and the reason we‘ve had peace in Europe for 80 years. I think the verdict is still out on this. Should we destroy human civilization with nuclear weapons at some point in the future, none of that peace will have been worth it. We've had so many close calls (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_close_calls https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_close_calls) that we're very lucky that this hasn't happened yet.

danenania 4y ago
I wouldn’t even say the verdict is out. Considering we’ve already had some relatively close calls, I think we can say with statistical certainty that we will destroy civilization on a long enough time scale if we keep the nukes around. If the odds of nuclear war are 1% in a century, we won’t last much more than 10,000 years, and might last a lot fewer.
- Qem 4y ago
  A presidential term is 4 years. Assuming it holds over 10000 years, that would mean roughly 2500 presidents. In a group of 2500 people, what are the odds of one of them being batshit crazy? That would be a lower bound to overall probability of nuclear annihilation.
  - danenania 4y ago
    It's even worse, as it's not only presidents/leaders that can trigger a war. If you look at the close calls Wikipedia page linked upthread, one of the worst was a Soviet sub that lost radio contact during the Cuban Missile Crisis. 2 out of 3 (!) of the officers on the sub approved a nuclear strike on the US fleet. The fate of human civilization relied on the choice of a single mid-level naval officer. Considering the other two officers approved the strike, the final officer being the kind of person who would also approve the strike was probably in the 50/50 realm at best. So basically we won a coinflip on that day for the fate of humanity, and that's far from the only close call we've had.
goostavos 4y ago
If the book Command and Control is to be believed, that list looks pretty incomplete_by a pretty significant degree. One of the staggering stats from the book: In 1957, one hydrogen or atomic bomb was jettisoned in every 1 out of 320 flights. And there were a lot of flights going on at that time, as the core strategies was keeping bombing power in the air. It really does seem like just plain dumb luck that we made it through those turbulent wild west days when the bomb was new without killing ourselves. Just as a side note, reading all the unexpected failure modes that popped up during the weapons program was remarkably humbling. Interactions with reality will poke all the holes in can in your world view. One of my favorite examples from the book: One of the early designs of the bomb required a human to specifically remove a key card from the bomb in order to arm it. This was deemed pretty safe. Until, an aircraft entered problems during a training mission and entered a spin. The centrifugal force of that spin was enough to suck the key out, arming the bomb on the way down as the plane crashed into the earth. There is, counter intuitively, a lot of comfort to be had in modern missiles from a "will we accidentally blow ourselves up?" perspective.

danenania 4y ago

I wouldn’t even say the verdict is out. Considering we’ve already had some relatively close calls, I think we can say with statistical certainty that we will destroy civilization on a long enough time scale if we keep the nukes around. If the odds of nuclear war are 1% in a century, we won’t last much more than 10,000 years, and might last a lot fewer.

Qem 4y ago
A presidential term is 4 years. Assuming it holds over 10000 years, that would mean roughly 2500 presidents. In a group of 2500 people, what are the odds of one of them being batshit crazy? That would be a lower bound to overall probability of nuclear annihilation.
- danenania 4y ago
  It's even worse, as it's not only presidents/leaders that can trigger a war. If you look at the close calls Wikipedia page linked upthread, one of the worst was a Soviet sub that lost radio contact during the Cuban Missile Crisis. 2 out of 3 (!) of the officers on the sub approved a nuclear strike on the US fleet. The fate of human civilization relied on the choice of a single mid-level naval officer. Considering the other two officers approved the strike, the final officer being the kind of person who would also approve the strike was probably in the 50/50 realm at best. So basically we won a coinflip on that day for the fate of humanity, and that's far from the only close call we've had.

goostavos 4y ago

If the book Command and Control is to be believed, that list looks pretty incomplete_by a pretty significant degree. One of the staggering stats from the book: In 1957, one hydrogen or atomic bomb was jettisoned in every 1 out of 320 flights. And there were a lot of flights going on at that time, as the core strategies was keeping bombing power in the air. It really does seem like just plain dumb luck that we made it through those turbulent wild west days when the bomb was new without killing ourselves. Just as a side note, reading all the unexpected failure modes that popped up during the weapons program was remarkably humbling. Interactions with reality will poke all the holes in can in your world view. One of my favorite examples from the book: One of the early designs of the bomb required a human to specifically remove a key card from the bomb in order to arm it. This was deemed pretty safe. Until, an aircraft entered problems during a training mission and entered a spin. The centrifugal force of that spin was enough to suck the key out, arming the bomb on the way down as the plane crashed into the earth. There is, counter intuitively, a lot of comfort to be had in modern missiles from a "will we accidentally blow ourselves up?" perspective.