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Comment by perihelions | Hacker News Reader

The analogy that leaps to my mind is when militaries accidentally shot down airliners because they got confused and thought they were under attack. This has happened literally dozens of times [0], well into the modern era. If even superpowers can't help but murder hundreds of civilians due to glorified UX errors, what's stopping them from making the same mistakes with nuclear weapons? It's practically the same thing, on a different scale.

The analogy is a broad one: a stressed human operator thinks they are under attack; they have a tiny amount of unreliable information, and a short time window to make decisions; they have an opportunity to counter-attack, but a false negative means the opportunity is irreversibly lost (because the adversary's aircraft attacked their aircraft on the ground / because the adversary's ICBM destroyed their ICBM on the ground).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_airliner_shootdown_inc...

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But how many of those resulted in some all-out war?

Any accident that looks anomalous, a single ICBM or SLBM, isn't likely to provoke an actual war with reasonable actors. The other side's just likely to then use the threat of war to extract truly painful concessions.

The "reasonable" thing still leaves out Russia, I suppose. But I have serious doubts they could even manage a nuclear strike at this point. How many missiles would make it out of the silos, how many bombs would detonate? The outskirts of Las Vegas have suffered worse than they could manage.

Yeah, you just keep believing that. According to various internet experts, Russia has run out of armored vehicles, out of rockets, out of drones, out of everything five or six times by now. Luckily for me, your military brass and political leadership don't take advice from the internet (since I am unlikely to get bombed if an all-out nuclear war starts, and don't care much for Mad Max-like existence).

Add to that NATO and US anti-missile systems.

Russia still acts rationally, but with poor assumptions (see Ukraine). If they were to actually launch a nuke at the West, for any reason, they would have to weight almost certain annihilation. One side of MAD still holds.

- "single ICBM or SLBM"

The threat I'm talking about is human error in command & control that causes the legitimate launch of a large number of ICBM's at once.

Even deliberate nuclear use might not trigger a nuclear response.

They've kept strategic ambiguity, but it's obvious that the US has developed a plan (or several plans) on how to react if Russia drops a nuke on Ukraine. And it seems clear that the US feels they can make Putin and Russia regret the use of nukes without using American nukes in response.

It's plausible that we could make them regret it. If the US simply entered the war on Ukraine's side, Russia's options are to wait patiently to be curb-stomped, or to escalate... and I don't think they could imagine that the US wouldn't retaliate disproportionately.

My country had shot an airliner of its own. It was an 'accident'. They shot down the plane which contained some of the best scientists and academicians of the nation, all whom have the vision of bringing nuclear power to our nation. This stuff were everywhere back in the day, from sabotaged national car companies to buried national plane prototypes. Our government was a puppet of US back then.

I wonder how many of those accidents are actually accidents.

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