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Comment by panax | Hacker News Reader

While it is difficult/impossible to accurately quantify the probability of war, and that the ground truth is far more complex than these simple models, there still has been a long list of historical incidents in which the outcome was decided by sometimes random and even independent factors outside of anyone's control and makes the gambler's ruin argument compelling:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_close_calls

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_military_nuclear_accid...

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There's two particular incidents that are great examples of this. The '83 false alarm [1], and the 1980 missile silo explosion [2].

In both cases, they were razor-thin near misses. If either accident happened even once more, we absolutely would have either a radiological disaster or accidental nuclear war.

It's this sort of thing that makes me think maybe we shouldn't have any nuclear technology at all, the risks are just too high. Climate change is bad, but not as bad as burning our entire planet to the ground in under an hour, then poisoning it forever.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Soviet_nuclear_false_alar...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980_Damascus_Titan_missile_ex...

> If either accident happened even once more, we absolutely would have either a radiological disaster or accidental nuclear war.

The Soviet incident sure, but the missile explosion was pretty much as bad as it could have been. You could explode the rocket fuel in every nuclear missile on the planet and you wouldn't get a single nuclear explosion, just scattered chunks of fresh nuclear fuel over a small area, which isn't really a huge deal compared to, for example, an oil pipeline leak.

I think nuclear energy is mostly orthogonal to nuclear weapons. We should pursue more nuclear energy and seek to eliminate nuclear weapons.

I wonder what if the Chelyabinsk meteor had fallen now, instead of some years ago. Could it have been mistaken for a nuke and triggered a "counterstrike"?

Given the universe's tasteless sense of comedic timing, I wouldn't be too surprised if a Tunguska-scale meteor lands right on DC, Moscow or Beijing at exactly the wrong time during an international crisis.

Still, in principle, the Russians and Americans, and I believe the Chinese, have satellites that detect the distinctive radiation burst from a nuclear explosion. (There's a detector on each GPS satellite.) So it /should/ fail to pass some of the automatic and manual thresholds before we're off to press the button. But in a tense situation, ambiguous data... one does worry a bit. There's been ambiguity with the detectors before. (Was there, or wasn't there, a nuclear explosion in the south Indian ocean in 1979? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vela_incident )

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