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Comment by adriand | Hacker News Reader

I really recommend watching A House Of Dynamite, the new movie by Kathryn Bigelow, which provides a highly realistic view of just how insane the entire nuclear system is. All of us live in a constant state of enormous danger: we are just 20 minutes away from apocalypse at all times. Even if you believe that nuclear deterrence is what prevents great power conflict, there is no avoiding the fact that it would take just one mistake or one technical failure or one mentally ill submarine commander to end civilization. We have to fix this, not make it worse!

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Not one: several mistakes, or several failures, or several people in a submarine. Those systems all have multiple stages that require several validation steps to work, we do that for way less sensitive processes.

Nonetheless, yes, we're still on the brink of something gloomy. The movie is quite good, and would massively gain from spinoffs showing what happens in realtime in other countries too.

What about a mentally-ill president?

Ah, good point. Sorry.

Also: how confident are we in the safeguards that, say, North Korea or Pakistan have in place? And how confident are we in the systems that tell us, and our adversaries, that an attack is taking place?

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov :

“His subsequent decision to disobey orders, against Soviet military protocol, is credited with having prevented an erroneous retaliatory nuclear attack on the United States and its NATO allies that would have likely resulted in a large-scale nuclear war.”

I thought that movie was so disappointing. I enjoyed the first part of it but then it just starts repeating the same conversations from different camera angles over and over again, and finally chickens out with one of those "you interpret this!" endings without answering any questions. I had to rewind to see if I blacked out when the credits rolled.

Spoilers!

I thought it was excellent. And I was disappointed with the ending, but I also don't know that any other ending would have been better. The point of the ending to me is that literally no one on earth knows what would happen beyond that point.

Our very civilization is Schrodinger's box that's a few mins away from being opened.

> And I was disappointed with the ending, but I also don't know that any other ending would have been better.

The very last scene, which I won’t give away but involves buses, is one of the most haunting things I have ever seen.

Extremely bad movie. Fearmonger porn with good acting.

Spoilers ahead, in case you decide to watch this bleak 2 hour waste of time:

"Oooh, nothing works, ooohh, we're going to die". This should've been a 15 minute YouTube video, not a movie.

It being bleak has nothing to do with whether or not it's good. If you have some specific complaint, name it.

I found it excellent.

> "Oooh, nothing works, ooohh, we're going to die"

I mean, to be fair, this is the actual situation with nuclear weapons.

There's nothing you can do. You just... die. Everyone. There's no magic bullshit the US can pull out of it's ass to prevent it. One singular nuclear warhead can be enough to eradicate the entire population in the US.

> One singular nuclear warhead can be enough to eradicate the entire population in the US.

How big would this warhead be? "One singular nuclear warhead" wasn't enough to eradicate the entire populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, much less Japan.

Modern ICBMs don't have payloads that large. A single warhead does not eradicate the entire population of the US- if you believe so, can you articulate the mechanism?

Warhead is incoming, US retaliates, its adversaries retaliate, we’re all dead.

If you think that wouldn’t happen, then you have to believe the US would accept a nuclear strike on one of its population centers and respond with conventional force and/or law enforcement. I am not confident!

I was responding to the "single nuke kills everybody" statement. I didn't say anything about MAD.

Modern nuclear strategy does not aim to use nuclear weapons to immediately kill everybody in the US. We moved away from really big payloads towards smaller independent payloads with better targeting precision, along with greatly reducing the size of the stockpile.

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