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Comment by tehjoker | Hacker News Reader

Standard MAD* was insane already. The governments of nation states were willing to toast the human race to preserve control by the elites of pieces of land and the illusion of a nation. They still are.

Even if you are taken over by a dictatorship, you can struggle against it afterwards. Some dictatorships were even somewhat positive (e.g. Napoleon Bonaparte) even though I would have sided with the pro-republican movement. There's no future if everyone is dead.

* The funny thing about MAD is that even though it's standard terminology today, that was the name coined by its detractors.

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> to preserve control by the elites

Stretch Armstrong would be impressed, this one is not easy to frame through the class war lens.

Nukes don't stop a rebellion. They do make other nations think twice about launching nukes at us, though.

> Nukes don't stop a rebellion. They do make other nations think twice about launching nukes at us, though.

MAD works until it doesn't. Even small escalations can rapidly ramp up into a worst case scenario. There is another path though: Disarmament though international treaties with comprehensive monitoring. Unfortunately, that was not the path taken as nation states that managed to accrue small advantages decided to press them instead. Today, the US is modernizing the nuclear arsenal to the tune of over a trillion dollars and is investing in tactical nuclear weapons.

> Stretch Armstrong would be impressed, this one is not easy to frame through the class war lens.

The cold war was about (some form of) capitalism vs (some form of) communism, which was in fact class war... However, in this case you can also see it as the ruling class is defending itself against control by another nation's ruling class. The people at the bottom are forced to deal with whatever the ruling class decides with little input.

> There is another path though: Disarmament though international treaties

I sleep better with a big deterrence arsenal than with a treaty that gets ignored the moment it becomes inconvenient.

> The cold war was about (some form of) capitalism vs (some form of) communism

The soviets didn't buck elite exploitation. Not for long and not by much.

If you think native elites are exploitative, I have news about foreign elites who have conquered you.

Regardless of who exploits whom under which regime, you'd have to have the mindset of a suicide bomber to prefer being dead than red - when you also unilaterally make that choice for hundreds of millions of people, many of whom entirely uninvolved in your conflict.

If they've reached the point where they actually have to use nuclear weapons in a MAD scenario, that political leader in question has failed at doing their job utterly, and completely irredeemably. It's a complete and utter betrayal of both their constituents, and the responsibility the world entrusted in them.

Why preface this with an "if" like it is a hypothetical where we don't know what happened? It is history now and we know how it turned out. MAD worked, there was never a nuclear war or major conflict between superpowers.

Political leaders didn't fail and have been redeemed. Their constituents weren't betrayed, and the world moves on.

That we did not have a world war does not imply that MAD works.

Moreover the world came incredibly close to total destruction a number of times, and in part it is just look that we are still alive. For example, imagine a different president than Kennedy in power during the Cuban missile crisis.

When did foreign elites ever conquer America?

Isn’t the opposite true? That American elites conquered the rest of the world.

The problem from game theoretical prospective is if you disarm and the other side doesn't your screwed. If the other side disarms it and you don't you win. Neither of you disarm and you maintain the status quo. And as you cant compel the other side to disarm there is no way to get to the mutual disarmament mutual win condition. Disarmament is just a prisoner's dilemma with WMD's and thanks to John Nash we all know mathematically the best move is to defect.

MAD works best also when you act as militaristic and insane as possible so the other side is afraid to do anything lest you kick the nuclear football. Hopefully everyone with access to the nukes knows this, but you cant admit you know this lest the enemy spies find out its a bluff thus weakening the bluff so both sides have to keep up the keefab at all time even internally. so while both sides may act like paranoid crackhead with a gun on the edge of starting Nuclear Armageddon for looking at them funny. They know its a suicide to actually fallow through. And it works. Why do you think the whole world puts up with the ongoing shit show in North Korea? They have nukes and can hit Tokyo Seoul Honolulu and Seattle.

Besides we don't even know that doesn't work. We haven't had a World War or major European war since the end of ww2. If we look back historically going 75 years without a major European war is amazing. all of the big wars since have pretty much been with major powers with non industrialized nations or collapsed failed nation states.

As for elites using nukes on the proles, that is ridicules and violates the don't shit where you eat rule. IE radiation poisoning doesn't care about your net-worth.

Well there's a reason there are safeguards agreements and inspections. The idea is a slow mutual drawdown and then eventually a rapid final disarmament once a critical low threshold is reached.

You can maintain the safeguards and inspections indefinitely via the IAEA.

https://www.ctbto.org/verification-regime/

But then it becomes a race to create the technology that can build nuclear weapons the fastest creating a more volatile equilibrium.

That's a good point but I suspect the feasibility of this approach depends on having large facilities and uranium procurement operations. These are things that can be regulated. You can see this in the Iran situation where their "breakout time" is measurable. With nations willing to negotiate, this could be brought under control. However, tbh I think they probably should have a deterrent as they are facing a serious invasion threat by nuclear armed powers. The world needs to scale down in tandem, not weaker parties first and stronger parties later.

not just fast manufacture times but replace many smaller yeild weapons but newer high yield weapons to keep the numbers in the agreed range but not actually reducing your damage potential.

You can make maximum yields part of your agreements. Of note though, the US during the Obama years improved the accuracy of submarine launched missiles which greatly improved the damage potential while staying in the agreed ranges. This was because fewer nukes would be needed per a target so overall damage could be increased.

For an example of this type of thing, see slide 11 (which refers to air dropped munitions rather than SLBMs): https://fas.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Brief2017_Italy2....

The problem with that argument is that at some point acting insane to keep up pretenses and actually being insane becomes indistinguishable and you end up with the situation that only a young Russian nuclear officer disobeying orders is saving the world from nuclear Armageddon [1]

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov

you only want the leadership to act insane not the people sitting in the silos. You want sober rational if possible anti nuclear war individual in the silos but again you cant advertise that or you break the keefab the whole thing rides on.

think you're missing the point -

the only people to survive a total nuclear war would be the elites sheltered in some bunker somewhere; the point is that decision makers were/are willing to risk destroying the species itself just so that the surviving 5 people could preserve their ideology/territory and 'win', not that nuclear war is a deterrent against local uprisings.

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