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I don't know about anyone else, but the simple fact that a large portion of human beings would elect other human beings with the capacity and resolution to pres

I don't know about anyone else, but the simple fact that a large portion of human beings would elect other human beings with the capacity and resolution to press the button in case of a MAD-type event to be completely asinine. The people with the drive and resolution to press the button that would cause assured destruction of you and your kind are the absolute last people that should ever be in a position of leadership. How we, the Russians and several other countries reached the conclusion that such people should be leading us is frightening and reflects quite poorly on the capacity of our species to scale. Is there any other social, colony-creating species out there that has developed a similar mechanism for retaliation against some threat that also guarantees the wiping out of their own colony?

mikeash 13y ago
It's the Prisoners' Dilemma writ large. We'd all be better off if we all cooperated, but we're individually better off if we defect. Incidentally, a lot of game theory was developed during the Cold War to analyze nuclear war.
arethuza 13y ago
I was very pleased to find out that at least UK politician admitted that, even if our country had been nuked by the Soviets, he wouldn't have retaliated - of course he couldn't admit that while he was in power! "You had to make people think you would use [the bomb] even when you wouldn't." http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2008/dec/03/denis-healey-defence-radio-interview http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2008/dec/03/denis-h...
alexqgb 13y ago
"The people with the drive and resolution to press the button that would cause assured destruction of you and your kind are the absolute last people that should ever be in a position of leadership." That was the cornerstone of Cold War propaganda. The leaders who'd do this weren't our own, they were the Soviet's. And as Godless Communists, they weren't even proper human beings to begin with, which made them even more dangerous. The only way to keep these monsters in check was to let them know that killing every one of us (which was surely their deepest desire) would also be the end of them. In reality, this was just not the case. As the animated map of nuclear tests shows, the most threatening country on Earth was US, by a wide margin. We took an early, unchallenged lead in developing nuclear arms, and maintained it relentlessly for decades. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=856fWEltiXo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=856fWEltiXo Watching this, it's hard to maintain the fiction that we were the good guys reluctantly responding to the looming Soviet threat. Put simply, there was no nuclear threat when we started arming ourselves heavily. In anything, you wonder why the Soviets took so long responding to the growing threat posed - without serious provocation - by the Americans.

mikeash 13y ago

It's the Prisoners' Dilemma writ large. We'd all be better off if we all cooperated, but we're individually better off if we defect. Incidentally, a lot of game theory was developed during the Cold War to analyze nuclear war.

arethuza 13y ago

I was very pleased to find out that at least UK politician admitted that, even if our country had been nuked by the Soviets, he wouldn't have retaliated - of course he couldn't admit that while he was in power! "You had to make people think you would use [the bomb] even when you wouldn't." http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2008/dec/03/denis-healey-defence-radio-interview http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2008/dec/03/denis-h...

alexqgb 13y ago

"The people with the drive and resolution to press the button that would cause assured destruction of you and your kind are the absolute last people that should ever be in a position of leadership." That was the cornerstone of Cold War propaganda. The leaders who'd do this weren't our own, they were the Soviet's. And as Godless Communists, they weren't even proper human beings to begin with, which made them even more dangerous. The only way to keep these monsters in check was to let them know that killing every one of us (which was surely their deepest desire) would also be the end of them. In reality, this was just not the case. As the animated map of nuclear tests shows, the most threatening country on Earth was US, by a wide margin. We took an early, unchallenged lead in developing nuclear arms, and maintained it relentlessly for decades. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=856fWEltiXo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=856fWEltiXo Watching this, it's hard to maintain the fiction that we were the good guys reluctantly responding to the looming Soviet threat. Put simply, there was no nuclear threat when we started arming ourselves heavily. In anything, you wonder why the Soviets took so long responding to the growing threat posed - without serious provocation - by the Americans.