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Comment by stareatgoats | Hacker News Reader

This is a throwback to an earlier age and zeitgeist - that seems to be fast approaching again. The same crazy idea might not resurface, but someone in the distant future will maybe (likely?) find some of our own, present-day convictions and schemes equally harebrained (like - cough - a renewed all out arms race involving multiple types of WMDs ...).

Otherwise I found this quote interesting:

> Incredibly, one scientist enabling this horrific scheme was future visionary Carl Sagan. In fact, the existence of the project was only discovered in the 1990s because Sagan had mentioned it on an application to an elite university.

It is surprising that Cark Sagan would have anything to do with something like this (but again, a zeitgeist compels all of us to do things that won't stand the test of time). It is also concerning to think that there might be projects like this that never gets revealed to the public - until it's too late.

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> enabling this horrific scheme

In a world where the Single Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP)¹ was the plan for decades, involving vapourising thousands upon thousands of targets, on a pre-set and inflexible list, including virtually all the cities in Russia and most of China with an estimated death toll near 300 million, this probably one of the less horrific plans. Still hare-brained, but at least not outright murderous.

1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_Integrated_Operationa...

Daniel Ellsberg gives an "official" figure of about 600 million for a US nuclear strike in the early 1960s - this would probably include about 100 million in Western Europe.

This was known to be an underestimate as US targetting ignored some relatively unpredictable effects of nuclear weapons - their thermal radiation.

https://apjjf.org/-Daniel-Ellsberg/3222/article.html

The mere existence of these plans and weapons have successfully deterred a nuclear war — so, while the execution of the plan would have been horrific indeed, the plan itself was something completely opposite.

It's sad that people often evaluate strategic military matters without applying even the minimal level of game theory.

I didn't say it wasn't an effective strategy, since as it happened and we're alive, clearly, luckily, it was. It's just that a plan to blow up a small part of the lunar surface seems fairly not-horrific compared to the actually authorised and deployed plan with a intentional 9-figure death toll and the practical annihilation of many allied countries (the UK in particular was not projected¹ to do very well at all).

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strath_Committee and that is for a fairly mild strike of "only" 10 bombs.

MAD prevented war but trying to circumvent it did not. Which is ultimately why space weapons were banned. The nuclear arms race is a game nobody should ever be allowed to win. That's a key point of the whole doctrine.

> The same crazy idea might not resurface, but someone in the distant future will maybe (likely?) find some of our own, present-day convictions and schemes equally harebrained (like - cough - a renewed all out arms race involving multiple types of WMDs ...).

I don't think we need to wait for the future, I think most normal people living now would already consider this entire situation crazy. The situation and context is obviously complex, but I doubt there are many people outside governments who think a WMD arms race is a good idea.

Now imagine WMD paired with AI.

Also, without making a big spoiler, read Silo. It shows a very relevant development.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silo_(series) this?

Yes

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