How to Roman Republic, Part IV: The Senate

Re:How to Roman Republic, Part IV: The Senate by xg15 on Saturday September 23, 2023 @06:31AM (#37622018)

Without wanting to do any speculation how the current situation will ever end, but I always assumed that the first stage of nuclear escalation would be nuclear tests - to exactly call this kind of bluff of the other side and to signal that the own side would be actually capable of performing a nuclear strike.

From what I know this was also what happened in the cold war - the nuclear threat back then was a lot more "palpable" than it is now, possibly because both blocks were already constantly launching nukes - they just weren't launching nukes at each other:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_nuclear_weapons_s...

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Re:How to Roman Republic, Part IV: The Senate by eru on Saturday September 23, 2023 @09:53PM (#37629440)

Yes. Though the test would only tell you that the other side has at least a few working nukes, not the proportion of working nukes.

(If a side could credibly commit to testing an unbiased (pseudo-) random sample of nukes, they would be able to convince the world that a large portion of their nukes work.

But I am not sure how you would do that without revealing all of your nukes?)

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