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Comment by W-Stool | Hacker News Reader

If this topic is an area of interest to you I can't recommend Eric Schlosser's book enough: "Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety". It is a whole history of known accidents in the missle and aircraft domains that involved nuclear weapons.

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The militaries' stewardship of nuclear weapons really puts the modern state surveillance panopticon into perspective. Collateral damage of tens of thousands of civilians accidentally dying in a fireball because these weapons "had" to be developed quickly so "the evil guys" didn't get ahead. And a similar dynamic where only civilian oversight can impart prudence, but the military works to escape any such oversight, so the only check is leaked anecdotes decades later.

Our trajectory seems bleak nowadays, but really we should be thankful the powermongers are just playing with data rather than inventing new weapons of mass destruction. With hope that topic will resolve itself with pervasive encryption.

> we should be thankful the powermongers are just playing with data rather than inventing new weapons of mass destruction.

Just playing with the data?

https://www.armscontrol.org/act/2019-04/news/trump-budget-bo...

"Consistent with the recommendations of the 2018 Nuclear Posture Review (NPR), the Trump administration’s fiscal year 2020 budget request would continue plans to expand U.S. nuclear weapon capabilities."

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...

"Donald Trump suggested firing nuclear weapons into hurricanes to prevent them hitting the US, reports in Washington claim.

The president is said to have raised the idea of bombing hurricanes with senior Homeland Security and national security officials on numerous occasions, dating back as far as 2017."

I was speaking at the level of novel technologies, not new implementations of existing technologies. New designs of nuclear weapons have a better opportunity to spend the time engineering safeguards against senseless failures, or at least we'd hope.

Note that I also wasn't speaking on the deliberate outcomes of mutually assured destruction, or the perhaps-even-worse outcome of some actor using a small number of nuclear weapons and getting away with it.

One might argue that use of a nuclear weapon - as intended - qualifies as a “senseless failure”, just not of the weapon.

The rumor that Trump suggested nuking hurricanes presumes that Trump would know of the history behind research around nuking hurricanes.

> “I got it. I got it. Why don’t we nuke them?” the president evidently interrupted, according to Swan’s source. “They start forming off the coast of Africa, as they’re moving across the Atlantic, we drop a bomb inside the eye of the hurricane and it disrupts it. Why can’t we do that?”

Really, in this alternate reality Trump is asking about disrupting the eye wall of a hurricane with super-heated air? I think both Trump lovers and haters can actually agree this is entirely not credible (for each their chosen reasons).

James Mahaffey's "Atomic Accidents: A History of Nuclear Meltdowns and Disasters: From the Ozark Mountains to Fukushima" is also worth reading - the scope is broader. It covers a period where research reactors were decommissioned explosively by pushing them to supercriticality and accidents in supporting plants amongst other things.

Agreed, this was a really good book.

"American Experince" also turned the book into a film, which was pretty true to the book and worth a watch.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Command_and_Control_(film)

Ah, I didn't know it was based on a book. Now I need to find the book. I suspect they will be very different experiences. Seeing the deep emotion of the interviewed really did well to convey the human elements.

The film (which was very good) mostly focused on the Damascus, AR incident. That was just one chapter of the book though.

https://www.amazon.ca/Command-Control-Damascus-Accident-Illu...

Another good one to illustrate the fragility of the world we live in: One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War by Michael Dobbs.

To me it was eye-opening to read about all the close shaves which could easily have ended in catastrophic misinterpretation by one side, and to wonder what might be going on along similar lines today.

The events described in this book were also dramatized in the movie "Thirteen Days".

I agree on the recommendation for Dobbs' book.

"Thirteen Days" is an enjoyable movie, but it does overlook the recklessness of some of the Kennedy administration's actions. For a more critical view, see this article: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/01/the-rea...

I just read the chapter about this yesterday. The book is excellent.

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