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One person can make one command decision and make #2 a reality. That's all it takes. No matter how many people drool over AGI the bandwidth and processing just

One person can make one command decision and make #2 a reality. That's all it takes. No matter how many people drool over AGI the bandwidth and processing just isn't there. We barely have control systems as intelligent as a bacterium.

vasco 2y ago
As far as I know no single person on earth can do it all by themselves - all the mechanisms I'm aware of at least.
- somenameforme 2y ago
  To my knowledge, this is correct. In theory a command from e.g. the President is authoritative and should legally be carried out. In practice, you'd require every person along the chain to implicitly agree to effectively ending the world. Even at the bottom of the chain, there are likely multi-key requirements so even there you don't have just one person with his hand on the trigger. This makes one of the biggest threats to humanity's survival being buggy software. If a software glitch from one side or the other suggests nuclear weapons are incoming, they will almost certainly retaliate in kind. And once the bombs are away, the other side will definitely respond, and that's pretty much gg humanity. In fact this exact thing very nearly happened in 1983. Soviet instrumentation indicated that the US had attack the USSR with multiple nuclear weapons. The technician on duty, Stanislav Petrov, [correctly] judged that what was happening was an instrumentation error, and disobeyed protocol - refusing to escalate it to his superiors who very well could have ordered retaliatory strikes. For some context this had happened at once of the highest levels of tensions between the US and the USSR. This was in the era of the 'Star Wars program', which was to be a US missile defense shield, leading the Soviet Union to become paranoid about intentions of a preemptive nuclear strike attack. Those tensions had already led to the downing of one 747 that had inadvertently veered into Soviet territory, while carrying a US Congressman at that. Given this context it's highly probable that his superiors would have ordered the retaliation. So he's one of very few people who can be reasonably said to have saved the world. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov
  - mrguyorama 2y ago
    In America this is not actually a useful thing. America's ICBM silos have technicians sitting in front of consoles, and basically every day, they get a command of keywords/numbers to punch into the computers. The technicians do not know whether the numbers are a test, or a real launch, at any time. This is purposely designed to prevent a low level button pusher from preventing the US from launching nukes. If the president wants to launch a nuke, the only thing that stops them is their cabinet simply not relaying the order. This happened several times when Nixon got shitfaced. Like nearly everything in american government, this is just a "norm". The only thing preventing an insane american president from doing pretty much anything, at least for a while, is "norms" and customs. Nixon wanted to nuke pretty much all of Vietnam pretty much all the time, and it was only his cabinet that prevented that. But there is no precedent, or legal reason, to actually force that to be the case. So what happens if you then get a president who has surrounded themselves with a cabinet that explicitly thinks Nixon was right, that Nixon had the right to burgle the Watergate hotel because the president should be able to do anything (this is a real faction in US politics right now) and have openly put together a plan to fire damn near everyone on day one and replace them with explicit yes men?
    - somenameforme 2y ago
      This seems to run contrary to basically everything I've read on this topic. For instance during Trump's presidency there was a tremendous amount of fearmongering about him possibly wanting to nuke North Korea. This led to commentary from numerous generals and others opining on the topic about whether they would or would not obey the order. Here's some rando link. [1] The sort of system you're describing would enable the President to unilaterally carry out illegal orders independent of the military. I just find it difficult to imagine that they would concede that, not only because of the power concession, but because of the ethical or even constitutional implications. Notably officers don't swear an oath to their commanding officer or anything of the sort - they swear it to the Constitution. As for Nixon, he was literally playing the madman as part of a strategic goal [2] (arguably the exact same thing North Korea is doing in modern times), but privately was the one who ultimately scrapped a plan that involved nuking Vietnam. [3] A nice quote from the Madman article (from Nixon), "I call it the Madman Theory, Bob. I want the North Vietnamese to believe I've reached the point where I might do anything to stop the war. We'll just slip the word to them that, "for God's sake, you know Nixon is obsessed about communism. We can't restrain him when he's angry—and he has his hand on the nuclear button" and Ho Chi Minh himself will be in Paris in two days begging for peace." [1] - https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5082689/Retired-gen-says-military-refuse-Trump-nuclear-order.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5082689/Retired-gen... [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madman_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madman_theory [3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_Hook https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_Hook
- Der_Einzige 2y ago
  Tactical nukes are sometimes under the command and potential authorization of battlefield commanders who in theory could operate without the authorization of a president. Consider a risk of this happening in the context of a border war between two nuclear armed states with low spillover risk to the rest of the world - i.e. pakistan and india.
  - vasco 2y ago
    The commander cannot initiate it himself. No single person in the United States, that I know of (no access to classified info) can physically do it by themselves. The commander would have to order someone else to do it at least. This is a huge component of the whole doctrine as far as I'm aware.
- tim333 2y ago
  Putin seems quite adept at launching dumb wars that no one seems very keen on.

vasco 2y ago

As far as I know no single person on earth can do it all by themselves - all the mechanisms I'm aware of at least.

somenameforme 2y ago
To my knowledge, this is correct. In theory a command from e.g. the President is authoritative and should legally be carried out. In practice, you'd require every person along the chain to implicitly agree to effectively ending the world. Even at the bottom of the chain, there are likely multi-key requirements so even there you don't have just one person with his hand on the trigger. This makes one of the biggest threats to humanity's survival being buggy software. If a software glitch from one side or the other suggests nuclear weapons are incoming, they will almost certainly retaliate in kind. And once the bombs are away, the other side will definitely respond, and that's pretty much gg humanity. In fact this exact thing very nearly happened in 1983. Soviet instrumentation indicated that the US had attack the USSR with multiple nuclear weapons. The technician on duty, Stanislav Petrov, [correctly] judged that what was happening was an instrumentation error, and disobeyed protocol - refusing to escalate it to his superiors who very well could have ordered retaliatory strikes. For some context this had happened at once of the highest levels of tensions between the US and the USSR. This was in the era of the 'Star Wars program', which was to be a US missile defense shield, leading the Soviet Union to become paranoid about intentions of a preemptive nuclear strike attack. Those tensions had already led to the downing of one 747 that had inadvertently veered into Soviet territory, while carrying a US Congressman at that. Given this context it's highly probable that his superiors would have ordered the retaliation. So he's one of very few people who can be reasonably said to have saved the world. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov
- mrguyorama 2y ago
  In America this is not actually a useful thing. America's ICBM silos have technicians sitting in front of consoles, and basically every day, they get a command of keywords/numbers to punch into the computers. The technicians do not know whether the numbers are a test, or a real launch, at any time. This is purposely designed to prevent a low level button pusher from preventing the US from launching nukes. If the president wants to launch a nuke, the only thing that stops them is their cabinet simply not relaying the order. This happened several times when Nixon got shitfaced. Like nearly everything in american government, this is just a "norm". The only thing preventing an insane american president from doing pretty much anything, at least for a while, is "norms" and customs. Nixon wanted to nuke pretty much all of Vietnam pretty much all the time, and it was only his cabinet that prevented that. But there is no precedent, or legal reason, to actually force that to be the case. So what happens if you then get a president who has surrounded themselves with a cabinet that explicitly thinks Nixon was right, that Nixon had the right to burgle the Watergate hotel because the president should be able to do anything (this is a real faction in US politics right now) and have openly put together a plan to fire damn near everyone on day one and replace them with explicit yes men?
  - somenameforme 2y ago
    This seems to run contrary to basically everything I've read on this topic. For instance during Trump's presidency there was a tremendous amount of fearmongering about him possibly wanting to nuke North Korea. This led to commentary from numerous generals and others opining on the topic about whether they would or would not obey the order. Here's some rando link. [1] The sort of system you're describing would enable the President to unilaterally carry out illegal orders independent of the military. I just find it difficult to imagine that they would concede that, not only because of the power concession, but because of the ethical or even constitutional implications. Notably officers don't swear an oath to their commanding officer or anything of the sort - they swear it to the Constitution. As for Nixon, he was literally playing the madman as part of a strategic goal [2] (arguably the exact same thing North Korea is doing in modern times), but privately was the one who ultimately scrapped a plan that involved nuking Vietnam. [3] A nice quote from the Madman article (from Nixon), "I call it the Madman Theory, Bob. I want the North Vietnamese to believe I've reached the point where I might do anything to stop the war. We'll just slip the word to them that, "for God's sake, you know Nixon is obsessed about communism. We can't restrain him when he's angry—and he has his hand on the nuclear button" and Ho Chi Minh himself will be in Paris in two days begging for peace." [1] - https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5082689/Retired-gen-says-military-refuse-Trump-nuclear-order.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5082689/Retired-gen... [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madman_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madman_theory [3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_Hook https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_Hook
Der_Einzige 2y ago
Tactical nukes are sometimes under the command and potential authorization of battlefield commanders who in theory could operate without the authorization of a president. Consider a risk of this happening in the context of a border war between two nuclear armed states with low spillover risk to the rest of the world - i.e. pakistan and india.
- vasco 2y ago
  The commander cannot initiate it himself. No single person in the United States, that I know of (no access to classified info) can physically do it by themselves. The commander would have to order someone else to do it at least. This is a huge component of the whole doctrine as far as I'm aware.
tim333 2y ago
Putin seems quite adept at launching dumb wars that no one seems very keen on.