Comment by rdtsc | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rdtsc | Hacker News Reader

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That why Russians created

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Hand_(nuclear_war)

Its purpose was to actually two fold -- ensure the ability to launch a retaliatory attack after a "surgical" nuclear strike and (and this follows from the first) ensure that hot headed generals or future leadership wouldn't be too quick to press the trigger on the very first warning (which might be a false alarm, and these have happened in the past).

That is a pretty nice system come to think about it.

So on first ever threat the #1 thing to do is enable this system. Then decide what to do, knowing, it would be possible to retaliate.

Note, what is interesting, they didn't broadcast to the world that they had it. Which is interesting. From a game-theoretic point of view, shouldn't they have broadcasted its existence as that would have discouraged a first strike?

What's the point announcing it to the world? They only needed NATO higher-ups to know it existed, which is pretty likely given the state of Cold War espionage.

That's what I meant by the "world" -- the adversary, not everyone on the street. How could they be sure that NATO leadership knew though. Feed it to a double agent?

Pick up the famous Moscow-Washington hotline and simply tell them.

The publicly released statements, from defectors and others, these many years after seem to indicate they haven't done that. I certainly don't know the truth but it would seem they would want to make sure to let the other side know unambiguously that this exists and that it works well. (Now maybe I am missing a part of the strategy that discourages this?).

No, but I think that you're missing any evidence that the relevant intelligence groups didn't unambiguously know that it existed. That it works well? My guess is that if it works well, or doesn't really work at all, US intelligence would probably be more likely to have evidence of that than wikipedia.

Fairly trivial - leak it and wait until one of the Soviet spies in the US Government hears about it.

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