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Comment by lobochrome | Hacker News Reader

It's bizarre that this type of information is made publicly available due to freedom of information legislation. What is the benefit? Or is it merely an acceptable side effect of the greater good that FoIA delivers?

Not that my curiosity isn't triggered, but...

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How many decades of well known mutually assured destruction would you consider adequate to release this information?

Not exactly a new system, surely has been inspected many times by all major nuclear powers over the years.

I guess… Why wouldn’t it be? At some point why would you keep it classified?

Funnily enough I’m just reading a book on Draper Labs and there’s a huge amount of detail on old inertial guidance systems.

The book to read is “Inventing Accuracy” by Donald Mackenzie

At what level is the book pitched? Detailed technical tome or pop-sci?

I was hugely disappointed by Blind Man's Bluff despite all the praise for it as it was written for a lay-audience.

Some details - it’s an academic study, definitely not pop-sci.

Blind Man's Bluff is a history of submarine espionage for a mainstream audience. I'm not sure what else one would reasonably expect of it.

Hot Spot of Innovation about Doc Draper and inertial guidance isn't academic but it does go into quite a bit of technical detail.

It's lacking in information of real military value, e.g. accuracy, failure rate, effectiveness of countermeasures, precise alloys used, etc. It's basically a description of a rocket, which probably isn't a surprise to other nations who are themselves building rockets.

Exactly. There's nothing here that "they" don't know already.

We want to make sure people believe in the deterrent. If people start to think they could take out all of our nukes somehow that would be dangerous.

It would almost be as dangerous as us building a system that we think could take out all of their nukes.

Why do you say this?

We have been in this very position before, in 1948, when we were the only people with nukes. We didn't first strike then.

The difference is that in 1948, the other side couldn't do anything about it even if it wanted to.

The other difference is that literally everything has changed in the past 76 years. But sure, maybe if we dig up Truman, Stalin, Chiang Kai-shek, Mao, and Churchill, and put them and their cabinets back in charge, it might work out.

Maybe they know the information has already been compromised.

Also what kind of a deterrence is this if the enemy doesn’t know about it?

It might be part of a disinformation campaign- a mostly correct document that includes some intentional inaccuracies or falsehoods.

> What is the benefit?

Sticking to our principles

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