In Nuclear Silos, Death Wears a Snuggie (2011)
wired.com
wired.com
So, this would be easy to automate. I often wonder whether part of the reason both the USSR and the USA put people in this process was that the hope was that those humans would not go through with real orders.
If the idea was that it (also) would help in detecting cases where the electronic parts of the system fail, that is clear indication that those in charge thought the humans in would sometimes deviate from the script.
If not, Mallory (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_and_Bob#Cast_of_charac...) could send launch codes to a bunker, all persons on duty would verify it to be correct, and they would launch their IBCMs.
The only thing this helps against is the single rogue soldier; that risk goes away, too, if you remove all soldiers from the chain.
Humans are more apt to see that something is amiss than computers are.
Not that what runs the silos is really that easy to mess with. They still do software updates with eight inch floppy disks.
I dunno. This seems pretty hinky to me:
"wireless Nintendo Wii controllers could cause the system to detect a false electromagnetic pulse attack and shut down."
And probably more importantly: because presumably when given that order, he might know some context a machine doesn't and actually disobey.
Why does it surprise you that someone in the military can write so well? There's a great history of brilliant writers and poets coming from the military.
Many people join the military before doing something else with their lives so you get a tremendous mix of talents and passions in units. I found that a surprising number of people turn out to be excellent sketchers and painters when working in the military, for example.
Because it prevented World War III.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Soviet_nuclear_false_alar...
> he's going to send them anyway
The good judgment of Stanislav Petrov shows that this isn't guaranteed.
Automation that can harm people always requires a human fail-safe. Leaving judgment to a mechanism only implies either hubris that assumes all possible situations have been accounted for, or enough narcissism to not care about the (possibly deadly) errors.
A human can currently do a much better job when the outcome is that millions of people die , especially if its a sensor error. That's not to say that humans are infallible, just that we do not currently have the level of AI required to replace one.
Both are bad, but people playing the game at all, were the real problem.
With great reluctance, Eisenhower agreed
to let American officers use their nuclear
weapons, in an emergency, if there were no
time or no means to contact the President.
Air Force pilots were allowed to fire their
nuclear anti-aircraft rockets to shoot down
Soviet bombers heading toward the United
States. And about half a dozen high-level
American commanders were allowed to use far
more powerful nuclear weapons, without
contacting the White House first, when
their forces were under attack and “the
urgency of time and circumstances clearly
does not permit a specific decision by the
President, or other person empowered to act
in his stead.”
Unbeknownst to both Kubrick and George, a
top official at the Department of Defense
had already sent a copy of “Red Alert” to
every member of the Pentagon’s Scientific
Advisory Committee for Ballistic Missiles.
At the Pentagon, the book was taken
seriously as a cautionary tale about what
might go wrong.
A decade after the release of “Strangelove,”
the Soviet Union began work on the
Perimeter system - a network of sensors and
computers that could allow junior military
officials to launch missiles without
oversight from the Soviet leadership.
Perhaps nobody at the Kremlin had seen the
film. Completed in 1985, the system was
known as the Dead Hand. Once it was
activated, Perimeter would order the launch
of long-range missiles at the United States
if it detected nuclear detonations on
Soviet soil and Soviet leaders couldn’t be
reached.
"Restraint? Why are you so concerned with saving their lives? The whole idea is to kill the bastards. At the end of the war if there are two Americans and one Russian left alive, we win!"
> Accounts differ as to the degree of automation of Dead Hand... more recent sources indicate the system was semi-automatic. In a 2007 article, Ron Rosenbaum quotes Blair as saying that Dead Hand is "designed to ensure semi-automatic retaliation to a decapitating strike." Rosenbaum writes, "Of course, there's a world of difference between a 'semi-automatic' doomsday device and the totally automatic—beyond human control—doomsday device."
"John Noonan is a policy advisor and defense writer. He served as a Captain in the United States Air Force, assigned to the 321st Missile Squadron in Cheyenne, Wyoming."
Maybe not, which is why they have the daily intelligence briefs.
Two areas to highlight the point:
- High-energy anything. There's a saying that any propulsion system that could allow us to travel between planets in a reasonable (for human) timespan is also a weapon of mass destruction. And it's not just space travel - history of technology in general is about getting, storing and making use of bigger and bigger quantities of energy.
- Self-replicating system. The best-known example of these is also known as "biology". Something we're only beginning to play with on a serious level. Mishaps, or worse - deliberate malicious actors by crazy individuals - could have planet-wide consequences as our ability to manipulate biological nanomachines grows.
Sleep tight :).
(Also, alt-text from https://xkcd.com/728/ - "Maybe we're all gonna die, but we're gonna die in really cool ways.")
Humans, unfortunately, are very optimistic when it comes to workplace and household safety, while at the same time extremely resourceful when they need to make weapons out of mundane objects.
The most recent Expanse novel is an interesting take on how apocalyptic such an event could be http://amzn.to/2aD2AFl
If we get to that point, scaling up just consists of waiting a few decades of exponential growth to kick in. It might not even involve humans, but just letting automated robots continue to build more robots.
If the technology is there, moving mountains instead of ships is just a small jump.
The Iraq Iran war was filled with incalculable human tragedy and horror, of which both sides were perfectly willing to accept. Both the people who chained children together and forced them to charge machine gun nests and the people who mowed down children chained together from their machine gun nests.
One of the likely reasons no terrorist group has tried too hard to obtain a nuclear weapon is they know whoever it is they fight for will be targeted for in kind retaliation. Aka MAD.
This may just be more whistling past the hypothetical graveyard, which seems distressingly common these days.