Ex-Minuteman missile officer: I could have faked a global missile launch order
lewis.armscontrolwonk.com
lewis.armscontrolwonk.com
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permissive_Action_Link#Developm...
Not to be dismissive, it's a hole certainly.
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!
He's seems to be one of the few people who was actually enthusiastic about the prospects of starting a (very one sided) nuclear war.
As the Romans said - "Si vis pacem, para bellum." - "If you wish peace, prepare for war." Pacifistic, restrained military and civilian leadership paradoxically can invite violence against you.
... the entire "madman theory" of coercion was flawed in its essence, depending as it did on twisted logic that assumed an adversary would respond to a calculated show of irrationality with something other than irrationality of its own. [1]
[1] http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0614-20.htm
In that article you can see what kind of danger unchecked assumptions and arrogance can lead people into, specially when these traits are carried by people with access to WMD.
There is credible deterrence and there is dangerous lunacy - Powers appears to have been uncomfortably close to the latter. Especially when he was wanting to initiate a strike which would probably have killed rather more than a billion people.
And North Korea went ahead and invaded the south even though everybody knew that Harry Truman had OKed dropping atomic weapons...
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> The Presidential identification (ID) codes … could delay implementation long enough to prevent a rapid response
To me, a naïve human who doesn’t want to see a nuclear winter, it seems that we should be optimizing for human life instead of immediate revenge. I would even dare to hope the response to a nuclear launch would be to roll over and surrender for the greater good. And while I’m no expert in game theory, I suppose the official line is that guaranteeing mutually assured destruction was the only way to prevent all nuclear attacks.
Edit I’m not talking about hitting strategic targets (do those really require H-bombs anyway?). And thanks for clarifying that the lives of citizens in allied countries are worth so much more than Russian citizens.
Since it would be very hard, though, for nations to keep enough around for mutually assured destruction without anyone noticing (or so I think) I would think that disarmament is not an entirely crazy idea. I would even assume that an agreement by the US, Russia and China would be sufficient. (I’m not sure to what extent Pakistan and India can threaten the rest of the World and I really don’t think Israel and North Korea matter. I’m also pretty sure that France and the UK would follow the US because they would look pretty stupid if they wouldn’t.)
Also with the fact that most Western European countries are quite small and densely populated compared to the United States and the Soviet Union the carnage here would have been indescribable (although if you want a feeling for what a "best case" attack might have been like feel free to watch Threads).
The moment the missiles are launched however, the side that didn't launch no longer has any advantage to launching a counter strike (assuming an all out strike was launched, not just one with a few missiles) and the leaders have every advantage to broker a deal for refuge in the other country, as theirs will soon be uninhabitable.
In Richard Rhodes Arsenals of Folly a close adviser to Ronald Reagan is quoted as saying:
"I think deep down he doubted that he could bring himself to strike another country with [nuclear weapons]"
Somewhat to my surprise, I'm from the UK and was in my teens in the 1980s where Reagan wasn't exactly portrayed in a positive light, I've found myself believing that Reagan probably would have had the moral courage to do such a thing.
That’s definitely what you want everyone to think. If I ever were in such a position of power I would leave no doubt about my will to strike back and in the critical moment don’t do it. I have no trouble believing that some other people think just like that.
edit: actually this one is even more appropriate: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MjaAqY_KFdw
My keen-jerk reaction is this: If your opponent wins without retaliation then they have probably won power over the whole globe. The hope of retaliation presumably would be to allow your allies, your nearest neighbours in cultural/ideological terms, to win the war despite you having won the battle.
Yes, winning the war might mean being the only few survivors in a world that was practically wrecked and having to start from nearly nothing to rebuild. But your own ideologies would be more likely to "win" if you retaliated, no?
Well probably anything related to "tamper proof" security (defending against attacker who has full uncontrolled access to "secure" device) of anything is security by obscurity at best (security of such commercial products is often based on that each device uses unique configuration of countermeasures) and pure snake oil more often.
In this case whole security of this system really relies on people (and their belief that there are some technical security measures that they cannot trivially circumvent) and focusing on technical means too much would actually divert resources to something that is actually not possible to do perfectly. USAF probably correctly assumed that relying on people is better approach. I remember that some (probably DoD-sponsored, in relation to WMD security) study asserted that only meaningful way to protect system from well funded and motivated attackers is to not let such attackers near the system (presumably by means of guarding it).