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"By the mid ’80s, the two superpowers possessed a combined sum of more than 70,000 nuclear warheads, a number sufficient to put 357 warheads, each with yields far exceeding that of the Hiroshima bomb, onto every capital city of every country on the entire globe."

That one line from the article scared me more than most things I've read in my life. The fact that humanity once wielded the weapons capacity to wipe everyone off the face of the earth hundreds of times over. Staggering.

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"The United States and Russia maintain roughly 1,800 of their nuclear weapons on high-alert status – ready to be launched within minutes of a warning.""

Yes, we're doing much better now.

Source: http://www.icanw.org/the-facts/nuclear-arsenals/

Yes it's surely not that the humanity only

"once wielded the weapons"

the threat is still too big.

The danger of the accident increases, as people (even those in charge) start to think that if nothing really bad happened until now it won't in the future. In fact, we in the computer related professions should be more than aware how easy is for some minor bug or glitch to escalate. I've posted this just some days ago:

The nuclear weapons, ready to be launched at the moment notice "are prone to the same problems any other computer-related projects are: the amount of the damage is effectively infinitely larger than the effort needed to start it."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13030541

And the accidents happen.

We must still push in the direction of the reducing the amount of nuclear weapons. The danger is still immense.

The sheer number of nuclear weapons has reduced dramatically since the bad days of the Cold War - but I do worry that the systemic risks of having a societal collapse are much higher these days.

Looking at the banking crisis - the UK government (and probably others) were terrified of the effects of a few banks collapsing - state of emergency, troops on streets etc. How would be cope if something really bad happened - not too well I suspect.

So what do you want to say? Do you think that the chances of states of emergency should be our only worry? Or do you think that the states of emergency can even more increase the chances of nuclear accidents, even more reducing the chance of continuation of the civilization?

And from a 60 Minutes episode I remember, there is no built-in self-destruct. Once it's in the air, if you don't shoot it down, you expect someone - a lot of someones - to die.

Kubrick, film, 1964:

"President: "You know how we've always talked about the possibility of something going wrong with the bomb. The bomb, Dimitri. The hydrogen bomb. Well now what happened is, one of our base commanders, he had a sort of, well he went a little funny in the head. You know. Just a little... funny. And uh, he went and did a silly thing. Well, I'll tell you what he did, he ordered his planes... to attack your country."

"Listen, I've been all over this with your ambassador. It is not a trick. Well I'll tell you. We'd like to give your air staff a complete run down on the targets, the flight plans, and the defensive systems of the planes. Yes! I mean, if we're unable to recall the planes, then I'd say that, uh, well, we're just going to have to help you destroy them, Dimitri. I know they're our boys."

"Who should we call? Who should we call, Dimitri? The people...? Sorry, you faded away there. The People's Central Air Defense Headquarters. Where is that, Dimitri? In Omsk. Right. Yes. Oh, you'll call them first, will you? Uh huh. Listen, do you happen to have the phone number on you, Dimitri? What?""

... (later) ...

"DeSadeski: the deciding factor was when we learned that your country was working along similar lines, and we were afraid of a doomsday gap.

President: This is preposterous. I've never approved of anything like that.

DeSadeski: Our source was the New York Times.

President: Dr. Strangelove, do we have anything like that in the works?

Dr Strangelove: Under the authority granted me as director of weapons research and development, I commissioned last year a study of this project by the Bland corporation. Based on the findings of the report, my conclusion was that this idea was not a practical deterrent, for reasons which, at this moment, must be all too obvious.

Dr Strangelove: it's remarkably simple to do that. When you merely wish to bury bombs, there is no limit to the size. After that they are connected to a gigantic complex of computers. Now then, a specific and clearly defined set of circumstances, under which the bombs are to be exploded, is programmed into a tape memory bank.

but the... whole point of the doomsday machine... is lost... if you keep it a secret! Why didn't you tell the world, eh?"

In reality:

"Dr. Strangelove's 'Doomsday Machine': It's Real"

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1132426...

"RAZ: Right. If it was supposed to be a deterrent, why didn't they tell us?

Mr. THOMPSON: And the reason they didn't tell us, there are a couple of reasons..."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/12/05/nuclear-missile-cod...

The code was 000000

Much of Hiroshima wasn't fully destroyed, and there were many survivors. Aside from the concerns about dud or destroyed missiles, you need a lot of missiles to destroy infrastructure that's more spread out.

You're also not just trying to destroy the 200 or so world capitals, but strategic assets in the US or the Soviet union. Between cities, military bases, power plants, factories and other infrastructure pertinent to waging war that 357 per capital number starts sounding a lot more reasonable.

This comparison is just another arbitrary irrelevant number journalists like to come up with that ultimately just serves to obscure the issue. It's like describing the amount of concrete in the Hoover dam in terms of the volume of VW beatles.

>> It's like describing the amount of concrete in the Hoover dam in terms of the volume of VW beatles.

Don't leave us hanging, what's the answer?

I'm using a concrete VW on the ocean floor as a reference. Its supposedly 8 tons.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/picturegalleries/8589222/A...

> How much concrete is in the Hoover Dam?

Three and one-quarter million cubic yards. (Normal weight concrete weighs about 4000 lb. per cubic yard, so 3,250,000 cubic yards weighs 6,500,000 US tons).

http://www.usbr.gov/lc/hooverdam/faqs/damfaqs.html

There are ~812,500 VW bugs worth of concrete in the Hoover Dam.

The Cold War era had a certain logic -- that once the US and USSR were effectively destroyed -- allies and neutral countries, even non-nuclear ones -- would become threats. If any missiles remained unfired, might as well re-target.

In other words, destroying the USSR only to be conquered by Mexico would have provided an ironic epitaph for the USA.

The numbers are so high because most of them would be destroyed/disabled on the ground before launching, so every one of many, widely dispersed locations had to have enough on-hand to complete any fire mission by itself.

Why? My understanding is that there would have been a few minutes of warning time, enough to open the silos and complete the launch sequence before impact, or ist that not the case?

In the UK the warning was supposed to be 4 minutes - it would probably have been a lot less.

That's not much time for a command authority to decide how to react, communicate and for missiles actually to be launched.

I grew up in the 80s in West Germany, thus I'm acutely aware of that fact - but this was about the arms race between the US and the Soviet Union, not NATO as whole I believe.

Well, the assertion was that the numbers were so high because of the risk of being destroyed quickly by first strikes. As far as I know, most weapons in the Cold War were tactical and stored close to likely crisis points.

Hadn't thought of that, you're right - Pershing II and stuff, doesn't get much more 80s Cold War than that.

Spetsnaz's main mission if the Cold War turned hot would have been taking out these kinds of assets before they could be used - destroyed on the ground means more than just ICBMs.

From missiles, yes. Special forces, b2 bomber strikes or coastal bombardment? There you may not get a warning.

I don't think bombers and ships reach firing positions quicker than a missile flies. Maybe the answer is submarines, they can remain undetected and are able to launch their missiles close to the enemy territory.

No, but they can remain undetected longer.

Relevant thread: "Why did the US and Soviet Union continue to build nuclear weapons far beyond the point where each side could completely annihilate the other ?" - https://www.reddit.com/r/WarCollege/comments/54phhu/why_did_...

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