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Comment by wallflower | Hacker News Reader

> 24-old junior officer fresh out of military academy. And if that person decided to press the button ... If/then. If/then. If/then. If/then.

The most deadly group of if/then statements in existence.

"A strange game. The only winning move is not to play." -Joshua, WarGames (1983)

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Oddly enough, I'm actually a little relieved that it does eventually come down to a person's decision. I guess if the decision is to end the world, a 24 year-old junior officer is as qualified to make the decision as anyone else.

I'm definitely more than a little concerned that they're still maintaining this thing though.... creepy

As the article says, when all of the information said junior officer has points to the fact that his country has been destroyed, he is just about as likely to turn the key as an if/else statement.

The fact that we'd tit-for-tat several hundred million lives is a saddest reality of the cold war. It's frightening how destructive our revenge emotion can be.

So a possibility just occurred to me. Build the whole device, but disable the key. You can't launch!

It would serve all sorts of deterrent purposes, but in the end, no revenge.

Of course, you'd need a few people to keep secret, but you could probably keep this to 2 or 3 people.

And where are the "else" branches, eh? Is this the final confirmation that multiple method exit points are evil?

At least they didn't use switch/case. Can you imagine forgetting to include a break between case statements?

There's a joke about Duff's (Doomsday) Device somewhere in there.

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