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A comment on Nuclear war is unlikely to cause human extinction?. Parent comment

Re:Nuclear war is unlikely to cause human extinction? by taneq on Friday November 13, 2020 @03:14AM (#25080189)
Not 'worth keeping a secret' - worth controlling the information revealed about it. In the case of nuclear weapons, you want to keep its weaknesses and fallibilities secret while trumpeting its existence from the rooftops. The more parties know you have a mega-weapon, the lower the chance you'll have to use it.
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Re:Nuclear war is unlikely to cause human extinction? by baybal2 on Friday November 13, 2020 @04:27AM (#25080614)
> The more parties know you have a mega-weapon, the lower the chance you'll have to use it.

But if you have to... the lower you have a chance to win, as the enemy with more than 1 gram of gray matter will do just anything to take it down before you can shoot.

Betting all of your strategy on assumption that the enemy is scared enough of you not to attack is stupidity beyond all bounds.

If you attack someone, especially if you attack somebody stronger than you, then you attack with all force available to you, and maximum ferocity.

You assume the enemy will willingly throw away his biggest chance to take away your biggest force multiplier, and the biggest chance to win?

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Re:Nuclear war is unlikely to cause human extinction? by taneq on Friday November 13, 2020 @09:13AM (#25082299)
> If you attack someone, especially if you attack somebody stronger than you, then you attack with all force available to you, and maximum ferocity.

True, IF you attack someone. But if you see someone who is unassailably stronger than you, that you couldn't possibly defeat, then you don't even go there. And that is the point of MAD. An enemy with one nuke is scary, scary enough to make them worth attacking. But an enemy with thousands of nukes, scattered across the globe, in unknown locations, which will launch at their signal (or lack of signal)... You just don't attack them.

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Re:Nuclear war is unlikely to cause human extinction? by baybal2 on Friday November 13, 2020 @09:21AM (#25082391)
And that's an extremely dangerous assumption. You don't need to dive deep into history for good examples of the opposite.

And if you dive deeper, you will find examples far more suicidal disparities in between warring factions.

Second, you do not count in a possibility of your opponent not even trying to win. If wars were fought by rational people, we would've long had math PhDs for generals.

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