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Comment by i_haz_rabies | Hacker News Reader

Why fire? If America is already gone, why retaliate? Revenge? What is there to gain? Retaliation would just make things that much more difficult for the rest of humanity, assuming the first strike didn't already make the earth uninhabitable...

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The purpose of a retaliatory posture is the foundation of MAD. If the posture, instead, is: We'll just rollover and die, then (the theory goes) there's reduced reason for others to avoid a first strike.

Yeah, I understand the reasoning of MAD, but on like a thinking individual level... when you get the order and are under the impression that this is a second strike, why hit the button? MAD clearly didn't work at that point, so why fire? On the off chance that it was a small first strike and this is a limited second strike? I, at least, would rather run the risk of upsetting the doctrine than run the risk of destroying all of humanity.

Perhaps there are 2 kinds of people: those who think the way you're describing, and those who would hit the button to retaliate. I wonder if the people who end up sitting in the missile silo are selected for the job by asking them how they would respond.

They are absolutely selected for that.

Did you by any chance read the _Three Body Problem_ novels? It is partly about this problem, but I won't describe the details because of spoilers. Highly recommended.

Contrary to popular belief, in the event of nuclear war we wouldn't all suddenly be vaporized. Especially today when the number of nuclear weapons is severely limited and there are credible missile defenses, in a first strike only a few major cities and military installations are going to be targeted. It's more important to hit DC 10 times to make sure some of them actually get through than it is to destroy, for example, Albuquerque. While you might seriously be looking at casualty numbers comparable to the whole of WW2 in a matter of hours, the vast majority of both populations would still be alive and relatively unscathed. If the other side still has their military capabilities while we do not, those survivors would be at their mercy. This is to say nothing of allied nations which may not have been targeted in the nuclear exchange but rely on our military for protection. Nuclear exchange is unfortunately merely the first part of WW3.

If someone in Russia has decided my family can be incinerated, I don't see why the favor can't be returned. I mean, if we had a mindset of "one human family", nuclear weapons wouldn't even exist.

There are American citizens in Russia, you would be choosing to kill Americans for petty reasons.

Revenge is probably reason enough.

But even a full Russian strike probably wouldn't 100% destroy the United States (and a full Chinese strike probably wouldn't even kill half of us unless society totally collapsed afterwards).

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