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Comment by 3pt14159 | Hacker News Reader

Not if you run the simulations. A city or three might get nuked in a tit-tat-tit exchange, but total war isn't currently likely. During the 60s and 70s there was the _chance_ we could just nuke all their nukes at once and maybe they'd get London, NY, or Washington, but we'd survive. A total strike is no longer even a first reach option because even if they level us and somehow cripple our nukes or kentic weapons we can just unleash a bioweapon on everyone and it's payback game over. I look at these weapons in the same way. There might be a couple dozen million deaths from an exchange that starts with them, but after some tense phone calls things will deescalate.

What I worry about is actors smaller than a well funded nation state getting weapons like these, and for that we need intelligence.

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I don't imagine things de-escalating after a couple dozen million deaths... But I hope you're right.

Thats not how the chain of command would actually work in a nuclear exchange. You are much more likely to go all in anyway.

Chain of command starts with the president. Look to how Moscow has acted multiple times when there were nuclear worries due to faulty equipment. Multiple times they waited until confirmation of a hit. Now thank goodness nuclear weapons haven't been used since multiple parties have had them, but had a strike actually occurred what do you think the response from Moscow would have been? Full military preparedness (obviously), including potential launching of a tit for tat response. But what do they have to gain from launching everything? For all they know some insane general in America launched the thing. If they don't see anything else coming why would they commit suicide by launching everything?

There is no benefit.

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. Like the Doomsday Machine in “Strangelove,” Perimeter was kept secret from the United States; its existence was not revealed until years after the Cold War ended.

http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/almost-everything-in...

The episode I'm referring to was after 1985, with Boris Yeltsin in the early 90s. However Perimeter was designed or used, I'm sure the Russians didn't create a system that caused total war after a skirmish of a couple small nuclear weapons.

The premise in the thread seems to be that after the first nuclear skirmishes, the only optimal strategy is to delay all-out response on the hope that initial firings were a fluke, an error, or a mistake. And that the ability for a delayed response is assured, so there's no point in rushing to press the annilihation button.

It may be true that delay would be the best option for maximizing probability of survivability in that scenario, however I do not think the capability exists to actually do this -- it might not even be possible to implement this strategy. I don't think it's possible to construct a control system that would manage the diverse array of retaliatory launch systems in a way that both preserves "guaranteed total annihilation of aggressor" and "arbitrary delay for retaliation after first strike"

You only need a very small number of doomsday devices in order to allow arbitrary delay for retaliation after first strike. Ten sleeper agents with extreme bio weapons in the likely aggressor country, for example.

There is no purpose in rushing to doomsday and a great deal of interested parties in not doing so.

That's the assumption that MAD rests upon.

Personally, I don't buy it. We've had many known near miss incidents that should have been escalated. I don't think that the people sitting in front of the keys will turn them.

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