After the first couple of sentences I came to the opposite conclusion: perhaps the greatest nuclear powers have all had their launch systems compromised already, and if people started pushing buttons nothing would happen. Comforting thought.

While a nice thought, that is only true if:

a) at least two of these secret security teams exist, funded by different political superpowers

b) the one team behind this worm was funded by a group insisting on global denuclearization.

Imagine if what you say is true for every nuclear power, except one (likely the one that is behind this worm).

Have we heard of any other enrichment facilities that have been targeted? There are still a ton out there[0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enriched_uranium#Global_enrich...

> the probability a nuclear actor's command and control drops below 100%.

It's never been at 100% anyway. Read the book "Command and Control" if you are not convinced.

Since the probability is below 100% IRL, this is trivially seen to be false. Evidence: Here is a hand. It is not irradiated...

Yes, it has the potential to break the MAD equilibrium. It's very ironic to me that offensive technologies do not threaten world peace as much as defensive technologies.

MAD is a local maximum of peace, but only if we define "peace" to include "tense standoff". It appears to be the best we can do in the presence of overwhelmingly powerful offensive capabilities.

Imagine the different "peace" if instead we had overwhelmingly powerful defensive capabilities.

But everyone would have to have those, or else the first country to develop them would have an insurmountable advantage. A country that has both nuclear weapons and the ability to block all attacks including nuclear would rule the world, or at least dominate it without opposition.

Or, everyone would have to have a strong sense that nuclear launches weren't possible.

I'm thinking along the lines of grey-hat anarchists constantly attacking everyone's nuclear capabilities. "If nobody is super, everybody is super."

Hence the local maximum.

...as if “world peace” is a thing.

>It's very ironic to me that offensive technologies do not threaten world peace as much as defensive technologies.

ummm... what?

> If there is even a 1% chance that when a Big Red Button is pushed the missiles fail to launch the game becomes unwinnable.

Why does that 1% make such a big difference?

Very interesting comments especially conclusion that voice for peace must be loudest. Generally, personally agree. However, what you think of current USA stance of beefing up defense and probably nuclear arsenal while others are not allowed such weapons? Won't it make them want these weapons even more?

That's all very well but theory and maths aren't too relevant when the man behind the button is an illiterate cretin.

The launch is a two person process and while in theory the second person is only there to verify the identity of the President this has never been put to the test and there truly is no way to tell what would Mattis do in a situation like this.

Removal from position due to medical incapacity is not only a real transfer of power mechanism but also fairly easy for the Vice President to do, assuming that the Secret Service agrees.

Remember, the Secret Service works for the US Treasury.

The problem is not everyone on the world stage is a rational game theory nerd that links to papers like we want them to be. Also 60 years of treating every other country as a box in a threat model to be manipulated against other boxes has been a completely unmitigated disaster, so maybe we should stop that.

> 60 years of treating every other country as a box in a threat model to be manipulated against other boxes has been a completely unmitigated disaster

Has it? The last 60 years have been relatively peaceful, by historical standards.

You want to ask all those who lost their lives in any of the numerous conflicts. Only, because the big clash didn't happen (it nearly happened three times in 1983), this doesn't mean that there weren't any conflicts. E.g., the biggest air war in history, in Laos, even was conducted in secrecy, African politics is just a single mess, etc.

Please consider orders of magnitude - we really do live in peaceful times.

Example: there's far fewer cold war deaths than from traffic accidents, let alone real wars.

WW2 killed 3% of all humanity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties

The end of the Han dynasty killed a large percentage of all chinese people.

For perspective: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_by_death_toll

http://asirt.org/initiatives/informing-road-users/road-safet...

Hm – Consider this piece (you may or may not appreciate the political perspective): https://www.globalresearch.ca/us-has-killed-more-than-20-mil...

In brief, it concludes that the US alone (there have been lots of conflicts without any manifest involvement of the US) has been involved since WWII in conflicts causing "the deaths of between 20 and 30 million people".

[Edit] You may also consider the ongoing war in Syria, which is not only exceeding WII in duration already, but also overshadows the total death count of the US in the WWII Pacific "theatre" (161,000 dead, including 111,914 in battle and 49,000 non-battle) by 500,000+ dead (last consensual figure was 470,000, issued by the Syrian Center for Policy Research in 2016).

we ought to ask people whose family members have died of cancer lately how they feel about our so-called advanced medical science as well

The world also became a lot more connected, so we're exposed a lot more to wars and such abroad, and we've matured morally speaking and can see that all wars are unnecessary.

I thought I read that people said nearly that identical thing shortly before the start of World War I. That world economies are so intertwined and peace was lasting.

Only in a western welfare bubble. Morality over war is what you can afford having other security needs taken care of.

> Only in a western welfare bubble. Morality over war is what you can afford having other security needs taken care of.

That's actually a false hypothesis of people in the 'western bubble' who haven't experienced war. Research I've seen shows that people in places that have experienced it, such as in Syria, are much more opposed to it.

And that bears out in Western experiences: Who created the UN, with the stated purpose to prevent another war? Who created (the ancestor institutions that became) the EU to prevent another European war? Who enforced the Geneva conventions and prosecuted war criminals after WWII?

The answer is, the people who had lived WWI and WWII. They knew far more of war than anyone today in the West, and they thought it was the worst scourge of humanity which must be prevented from happening again at almost any cost. Who are we to disagree?

Do note the same countries still wage war (and trade in realpolitik). What you're saying is not mutually exclusive with what I'm saying, it's on a continuum.

The western world has developed institutions that give it security. Once those parts of the world ravaged by war do the same, they too will enjoy peace and stability.

Well, we're undoing these institutions with an ever-growing fervor, as we appease the insecurities of a few rich and powerful people by handing them yet another election and yet another few units of currency on top of their almost unimaginably huge mountain of existing wealth.

Right, but it's difficult to establish those institutions when your country is ravaged by war and corruption...

For all the evidence we have, MAD has worked. Still here. Still no WWIII. At the beginning of the twentieth century it was looking like we'd have another world war every twenty years or so for the rest of time.

As best we can tell, nukes actually did end large-scale war. I would call that at least a partially mitigated disaster.

You're not wrong, but there were multiple incidents during the cold war where the US and Soviet Union came very, very, very close to a nuclear exchange, and it was only dumb luck (and sometimes the heroic actions of individuals who were in the right place at the right time) that saved us. We were lucky, and luck is not a plan.

The unwillingness of people to start a nuclear exchange is exactly the plan. In the examples you speak of, common soldiers and technicians refused to launch the missiles. It's noteworthy that the idea of a full-scale thermonuclear exchange is so horrifying that even soldiers who assume they are already dead and have orders to launch still refuse. I think that speaks a lot about the inherent goodness of humanity, but that's a different story.

I know it came very close, but the assumption was that it would come to the brink yet nobody would want to go through with it and begin open aggression. Seems dubious and risky, but once again it worked. And let's not discount the negative risk--a conventional world war with the Soviet Union, China, the US and Britain would have been so terrible.

With such a small data set we should still be dubious, but I don't know if we can consign it merely to luck. I think it was a good plan. Terrible publicity, though. Nightmarish. But so is war.

I think that weapons range, combined with either precision targeting or large numbers, gets that job done. Picture a world without nukes, but with lots of highly accurate ICBMs and SLBMs. The attacker can expect to be attacked, with the destruction being stuff like the Kremlin or Whitehouse or parliament building.

In the days of WWII, an attacker could rightly feel confident that there could not be an immediate response that strikes anything of importance. The attacker might even believe that such a response could not be possible ever in the future. Poland could be invaded without any realistic worry that Berlin would be attacked that same day, and a bit of optimism turns that into Berlin being safe.

Maybe so, I have no idea. I think they'd just hardened bunkers and go to war anyway. But really it doesn't matter; the genie is out of the bottle, so MAD is really the only plan available. Can't un-invent the bomb.

Actually, the bomb and its design and construction require so much tacit knowledge that we might be on the verge of uninventing it already.

https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/230699

http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/1018881.pdf

http://public.lanl.gov/bsims/pdf/4S%20tacit%20knowledge.pdf

I don't see how that argument is justified. Maybe the Marshall Plan and the European Community saved Europe from war. Maybe Maybe globalization and general civilization-wide wealth creation made it so the elite's and xommonners businesses are less profitable in large scale war. (Note that even today, wars happen in poor countries, not rich countries). Maybe democratic evolution made the "send peasants to war" model obselete, and maybe modern communication made it harder to sell the fascist lies that motivated WWII. Nuclear Weapons didn't prevent Vietnam or Korea or the Middle East wars.

While my humble opinion is that MAD was effective, let's be careful not to infer causation from a sequence of events (the rooster crows and then the sun rises). And the events of 'MAD' and 'peace' are not in sequence: WWII ended in 1945. MAD wasn't an idea until the 1960s and not implemented in a treaty until the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, AFAICT.[0]

It makes more sense if you remember that nuclear weapons and delivery technology didn't reach the 'assured destruction' stage for awhile. Remember that in the Korean War, in the 1950s, General MacArthur was pushing to use nuclear weapons (IIRC); it wasn't as taboo then. Finally, remember that MAD applied only to the Soviet Union and U.S. (or the Warsaw Pact and NATO), while major international wars ended worldwide, for the most part. Remember that WWI and WWII were fought between future NATO members; the later peace between them wasn't due to MAD.

> At the beginning of the twentieth century it was looking like we'd have another world war every twenty years or so for the rest of time.

The victors of WWII were very concerned about that, and began planning to prevent it before the war ended. That resulted in the UN, the institutions that became the EU, a rejection of nationalism (as a significant cause of war), the spread of democracy and universal human rights as a peace-making policy (democracies generally don't start wars with each other), and U.S. leadership in the international order to maintain those things and to provide stability. My understanding is that those are the reasons for the relative but extraordinary peace. Here's a Churchill speech about it in Zurich in 1946 (the speech focuses on the future EU; remember he also was one of the architects of the United Nations):

http://www.churchill-society-london.org.uk/astonish.html

(I'll also note that they seemed to have worked so well that now people take the peace for granted and are tossing aside the things that make it happen.)

[0] The best credible source I can find quickly. If you hit a paywall, access it via a search engine: https://www.britannica.com/topic/nuclear-strategy#ref1224926

EDIT: Added a detail

I partly agree with you but a less charitable interpretation is that we had a bipolar hegemony that prevented full-scale wars. Many regions experienced significant violence, often caused or abetted by Western powers that turned out to be less committed to democracy and human rights when they got in the way of power politics. (Edit - or other powers that barely bothered paying lip service to human rights)

Again, I broadly agree with you and would definitely prefer to see a continuation of the past 60 years over whatever’s on the horizon, but let’s not get too rose tinted about Weatern benevolence.

I agree. The reason I didn't go into the detail you did was that I just had to draw a line on the length of the comment, for my sake and for the sake of the reader. I'm glad you added your comment.

Your timeline is wrong. Bernard Brodie came up with Nuclear deterrence in 1946. The Soviets would have read his work or understood the implicatikns. There was a reason they raced to get the bomb.

> Bernard Brodie came up with Nuclear deterrence in 1946. The Soviets would have read his work or understood the implicatikns. There was a reason they raced to get the bomb.

Mutually Assured Destruction is not the same as Brodie's Nuclear Deterrence AFAIK (which admittedly isn't much). In 1946, neither side could come close to assuring destruction of the other; the Soviets didn't have any atomic bombs until 1949, the U.S. didn't have the H-bomb until 1954, and of course neither had ICBMs, The best production rocket was probably the V-2.

I haven't actually read Brodie, I'm just going on my memory from my strategic studies class. But my recollection is that he more or less fully fleshed out nuclear warfare theory in 1946. The tech wasn't there, but the logic of the weapons was.

MAD is less a strategy than a reality. As long as each side has weapons that can't be credibly destroyed in a first strike, you have MAD, whether theorists explicitly call for it or not.

Though of course submarines make this easier to achieve in practice.

I might be wrong about this though, perhaps there were significant differences between Brodie's 1946 theory and later MAD developments.

Thanks. A couple things I don't think are accurate, based on my limited knowledge:

> As long as each side has weapons that can't be credibly destroyed in a first strike, you have MAD

With the significant qualifier that you need enough weapons to survive to completely destroy the enemy.

> MAD is less a strategy than a reality

I'm pretty sure that's incorrect. It was and is a specific strategy and implementing it was the reason for the ABM treaty and others - defensive weapons would make destruction less "assured". See the source I linked above.

The thing with defense is that even without the ABM treaty, we don't have an effective defense. MIRVs will always be cheaper than single shot ABMs, and their reliability is too low to rely on in the event of a second strike. That's what I meant by it being a reality.

People do of course adopt it as a strategy as well. But if effective defense tech existed I don't think the strategy would hold. The US abandoned the ABM treaty even without such technology.

As for your first point, it's true that MAD didn't really conclusively come into force until submarines. But there were efforts before then to maintain a second strike capability, such as keeping a certain percentage of bombers in the air, preparing them for fast takeoff, etc

Maybe not 100% assured second strike, but the basic idea was the same

Do we really have enough data to draw conclusions? A nuclear war could break out in ten years time and be orders of magnitude worse than WWII. That would invalidate MAD in an instant.

Nuclear weapons create a requirement that you safety depends on the pragmatism and sanity of leaders and government. Not only of your own country but your enemies.

The patterns of history suggest we are heading for unclear war. Power (manifested as interest) has been present in every conflict - no exception. Every nation eventually gets the war it is trying to avoid - nuclear war too. Decision-makers delude themselves that the course they are on will not lead to annihilation, but it always does. World leaders are deluding themselves now. Read more at: http://www.ghostsofhistory.wordpress.com/