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Comment by Quinner | Hacker News Reader

If public ownership means we give one guy a button to end the world, I'm not sure how's that's a meaningful difference.

Pretty sure the military made it clear they aren’t launching any nukes, despite what the last President said publicly. They also made it clear they weren’t invading China.

https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2017/11/18/politics/air-force-genera...

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-58581296.amp

We all get to vote for that person.

> all

Some of you do. The rest of us are left with the consequences.

Well, not exactly “we all”, just the citizens of the country in possession of the kill switch. And in some countries, the person in question was either not elected or elections are a farce to keep appearances.

Oh, that's super. I've been really impressed recently with the wisdom of our collective selections.

Democracy sucks, but we haven't found anything better.

See section 5 https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2024/05/how-ai-will-c...

No one single person can cause a nuclear detonation alone.

The President of the United States has sole nuclear launch authority. To stop him would either take the cabinet and VP invoking the 25th amendment and removing him from office, or a military officer to disobey direct orders.

Are you under the impression the president can actually do it? It's not true, someone else at least needs to at least push another button. I'm 100% sure of what I said in regards to the USA, just not hidden nuke programs I wouldn't know about. No person in the USA can single handedly trigger a nuclear weapon launch. What he has authority to do is ask someone else to launch a nuke, and that person will then need to decide to do it.

Even the president needs someone else to push a button (and in those rooms there's also more than one person). There's literally no human that can do it alone without convincing at least 1 or 2 other people, depending on who it is.

The fact that the world hasn't ended and no nuke has been launched since the 1940s shows that the system is working. Give the button to a random billionaire and half of us will be dead by next week to improve profit margins.

Bikini atoll and the islanders that no longer live there due to nuclear contamination would like a word with you. Split hairs however you like with the definition of "launch" but those tests went on well through the 1950s.

A nuclear weapon hasn't been detonated in anger since 1945.

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