I encourage everyone concerned about nuclear weapon safety to watch the Jan 10 premiere of the documentary version of Eric Schlosser's book "Command and Control"
This. The news has tried to make us panic about literally everything for decades now, and it's getting a little tiring to be afraid or outraged of something 24/7. It's the Two Minutes Hate, stretched out to all day long, provided by the media, not the government.
You know, I haven't drank the "kek" koolaid and given Mr. Trump's historic cozy relations with the mob (Roy Cohn, Casinos), his strange manner of draining swamps by filling it with the worst sort of toxic sludge from Wall Street, and his irrational and excessive love for Israel ("they will [never] pay for it"), am not willing to suspend disbelief regarding his being yet another distraction for the citizenry of this nation by the moneyed class, but you start off with:
"In a best-case Trump scenario, he bumbles around for four years doing not much except embarrassing himself and the country."
This guy does not have a history of bumbling around. He seems to be quite an effective man of action. I think you "embarrass" yourself by starting an analysis with that paragraph.
Then a bit down below you say:
"It can be fun to have secret, unchecked powers when your guy is in office, but is incredibly dangerous when the other guy does."
It can be "fun" to have leadership with "unchecked power"?
Man, get over your totalitarian urges before you decide to play cassandra for the rest of us who do not think it "fun" at all, under any circumstances, to have leaders with "secret unchecked powers" in our Republic.
Well hey, the right was terrified of Obama and he turned out to not be that bad so its basically the same thing right? The world is grey and fears about Trump are only as legitimate as fears about Obama and are all equally founded. /s
That's a false equivalency to be sure. Right wingers were afraid of what they claimed President Obama would pursue in policy. Critics of President-Elect Trump are fearful of _his own stated policies._
I was being sarcastic, not sure if /s was sufficient to flag it, I can't quite tell from your response.
I agree and I've tried to explain that to my conservative friends and co-workers but it never quite makes it through. Because Sharia law and death-panels never came to be a lot of them feel fine in brushing off my concerns about Trump, despite the complete false equivalency between the two.
You could write that story about a lot of billionaires that have been involved in numerous businesses. From T Boone Pickens to Jeff Bezos to Warren Buffett (he has lost very large sums of money on numerous occasions with poor investment decisions).
Paul Allen lost $15-$20 billion across dozens of poor business decisions spanning decades. That doesn't mean he's an idiot or ineffectual. He also still has $20 billion.
Trump lost $916 million? He has ~$4 billion. So that just makes him more effective than 99.999% of all business people on earth, right?
His success: getting banks to invest so much on him that they did all they can to keep him afloat. Borrowing so much to become "Too big to fail."
Successfull as a con man can be.
Giving the money of his father to an index fund would result in the same or more wealth today. But he got to be so "visible" this way... up to becoming a president for being a known TV face.
I don't think "effective man of action" is very accurate. His most effective skills are publicity and marketing, but now that he's reached the presidency I'm not sure how much more those skills can help him.
He started with a lot of money and a family business and has done well, but the organization is not that big and not very remarkable if you ignore the marketing. I realize "he is the president" is a pretty good counterargument to "he's not an effective man of action", but hopefully you understand what I'm saying. I think his record is somewhere in between "bumbling around" and "man of action", probably a little closer to bumbling if you look at all his failures.
Yes, he susbtantially built up his daddy's money and business, and upscaled it by taking it across East River to Manhattan. I would also think it fair to add "opportunist" to the list of his effective skills. I also think it fair to point out that plenty of rich kids end up skating through life, doing zip, and ultimately blowing the family fortune.
As to what constitutes effective "action" for a developer, sure he didn't lay bricks, but he made the deals, got the (opportunistic) tax breaks, and managed to fix up properties that were sitting stagnant. The Commodore Hotel, for example. And this same media that is ragging on him used to nauseate people like me who don't worship the shiny metal with its pimping of Mr. Trump.
And failures in business are par per course. If failure in a business venture makes a person a bumbler, then what to make of our current business hero's statement that "failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough"? (That was Elon Musk, btw.)
Well, I don't think Elon Musk would be a good president either. But I didn't mean to say failing makes him a bumbler, I meant his specific failures do. The details of his failures, not just their existence.
>His most effective skills are publicity and marketing, but now that he's reached the presidency I'm not sure how much more those skills can help him.
Did you see his tweet against the GOP's gutting of the Ethics Office? He still has the ear of millions of Americans and will continue to have that ear for the next 4 years. To think that he isn't going to be able to use that to his advantage is naïve. This is someone who has literally been shaping US foreign policy over Twitter. The "he's at his peak and can't do much more from here" line of thought has been brought up since the Republican primaries and it is as wrong now as it was then.
You mean his tweet where he said it was a good idea, just maybe not the most pressing issue? I did. Anyway, I didn't mean to say he won't do anything. As president, it would be difficult to not shape US foreign policy. But while he obviously has a history of taking action, he has a very mixed record of taking successful action, which I think is part of being effective.
And he does have the ear of half the country, but in the past it has seemed like he's really only good at marketing himself, not so much his products and businesses. So of course he can use his followers to his advantage, but I don't see a lot of evidence that he will use that advantage well. Being able to push something through Congress doesn't mean he'll be able to make it work and make people buy into it.
> This guy does not have a history of bumbling around. He seems to be quite an effective man of action.
I took the "best case" to mean that Trump is so caught up in his daily Twitter fueds (Arnold Schwarzenegger today) to push any significant legislative changes or start a war. Clearly Trump has had some degree of success in the business and marketing world.
Personally I think Trump knows exactly what he is doing when he makes outrageous public statements or goes after someone (distracting from issues like Russia, his conflicts of interest, the repeal of the ACA etc), but it's not a great leap to see how that behavior could cause issues in the world of international diplomacy. He has already made comments about nuclear proliferation, nuclear arms races, the one China policy, and the role of Russia in our recent election cycle. The linked article alludes to how quickly normality can spiral out of control especially if everyone assumes "it can't happen".
That last comment from the person who "asked his parents how they could have let Hitler 'happen'" is frightening, and needs to be repeated:
"The same question I asked my parents: how could you let Hitler come to power? And their answer sounds frightening familiar: it sort of happened (he was elected after all), he promised to make the country great again and everybody thought that once in power, the guy would settle and not do too much damage.
Well, we all know how that ended.
And that guy didn’t have a nuclear button. This one has."
- A citizen of this planet: January 4, 2017 at 4:06 am
> This is a post based on logic and knowledge and logic and knowledge played little role in the election. Maybe, outside of elite spheres, it plays little role at all in human life.
Maybe it's because you write shit like this. Condescending doesn't even begin to describe your last paragraph.
If I were to begin arguing why your article is wrong, one thing would be that you overestimate the amount of power a president has, despite being commander in chief. There are too many vested interests operating behind what is publicly seen, that would not allow a nuclear apocalypse to happen.
I'm not terrified because I don't think Bill Perry is really terrified either, in his own words from the article:
>“I do not think it is a probability this year or next year or anytime in the foreseeable future. But the consequence is so great, we have to take it seriously. And there are things to greatly lower those possibilities that we’re simply not doing.”
A nuclear catastrophe, statistically, poses a much lower risk to my well being than tornado season. Also occasional flash flooding, especially while driving. Oh, and extremely dry summers with little rain that make for wildfire conditions. Also, there's heat stroke if I'm being active...I guess what I mean is I do believe, deep down, that there are people who genuinely care and will work on such serious matters.
Serious people who take things seriously. I applaud them and hope my tax dollars support them appropriately, public and/or private sector. Sort of like geologists working to study the devastating potential of fault lines or volcanic activity. After seeing what extreme weather can do, and how resilient the US population seems to be, I'm honestly grateful to not have to have "Duck and Cover" as part of my everyday psyche.
Did you read the entire article? He makes a point to discuss expectation values as the metric to judge the seriousness of addressing a nuclear event, not the statistical probability value
> Perry wishes more people were familiar with the concept of “expected value.” That is a statistical way of understanding events of very large magnitude that have a low probability. The large magnitude event could be something good, like winning a lottery ticket. Or it could be something bad, like a nuclear bomb exploding. Because the odds of winning the lottery are so low, the rational thing is to save your money and not buy the ticket. As for a nuclear explosion, by Perry’s lights, the consequences are so grave that the rational thing would be for people in the United States and everywhere to be in a state of peak alarm about their vulnerability, and for political debate to be dominated by discussion of how to reduce the risk.
Expected value breaks down with what I like to think of as the Pascal's wager fallacy: if you consider the consequences effectively infinite, any positive probability means you should think about nothing else.
It took a long time to get to the article's actual suggestions (eliminate all ICBMS?); until that, this was just fear mongering.
Dismissive comments like these miss Perry's concerns entirely. We've been on this sleepwalk towards increasing nuclear risk long before Trump. There are many existing risks which are still inadequately addressed. Loose material being acquired by terrorists, North Korea, a Russia more openly using nuclear weapons as a threat (installing nuclear capable missiles in Kaliningrad as we speak!), the previous $1 Trillion US nuclear modernization program which while addresses many safety concerns introduces new tactical capabilities for weapons packages making them more usable.
He speaks out for concern on all of the above. The article states he hopes to meet with Trump & Mattis to work with him and give his advice.
If you want to disagree with him, then give an argument. However if you want to do a quick smear and dodge then keep repeating that it's "thinly veiled political commentary" over and over again.
Five months ago, there wasn't an increased vocalized threat of risk towards, for example, the Iran nuclear deal, or vocalized suggestions of nuclear arms proliferation increasing. There is new information now, and that needs to be factored into level of concern. Of course it's political, but that doesn't excuse new information from having an impact on risk assessment.
Are you sure the risk from tornadoes is higher? It looks like the odds of sustaining an injury or being killed by a tornado are somewhat under 0.1% per year for residents of Tornado Alley, and you can greatly reduce that for yourself with some simple precautions. I would guess that the risk of a nuclear holocaust is 0.1% per year or more, and there is nothing you can do to reduce the risk of it happening to you. (There are things you can do to increase your odds of survival and improve your likely position afterwards, but you will be severely impacted no matter what.)
> I would guess that the risk of a nuclear holocaust is 0.1% per year or more
> I would guess
Based on what? Unless it's based on something similar to where you got the 0.1% risk for a tornado it's no more accurate a guess than if you had said 0.01% or 1% or 80%.
Based on my understanding of the situation, and in particular based on several incidents over the past six decades where it was narrowly averted in situations where a few people having a bad day could have made it happen.
I'm not making any claim to accuracy. That's why I used the word "guess."
Note that the comment I replied to implies that the risk of a nuclear holocaust is "much lower" than 0.1% per year. Why aren't you hassling them about that claim too? Unlike me, they just stated it as if it were a plain fact.
He's a Bayesian, and his priors are predicated on the belief that the lack of apparent intelligent life in the universe is attributable to self-annihilation.
In all seriousness, calculating a probability of death from nuclear calamity isn't going to be possible without a great number of caveats and assumptions. It isn't like a meteor strike, because we at least have some record of that stretching back a long time. It's also not like meteor strikes because I believe the disaster generating process (people with buttons wired to faulty / hackable control systems) to be a giant mess of scary.
Based on several past incidents I would say we had a 50/50 shot of a nuclear holocaust over the last 70 years. That's around 1% per year. However, most of the incidents seem to be fairly old so we can probably drop that to 0.1% per year unless you live in India or Pakistan.
EX: "Solar Sunrise" is not that old and the US was seriously considering using nukes as NORAD was having major issues. IMO, large scale nuclear war was still unlikely, but the odds where probably well over 1% that year.
PS: Remember, WWI started from a chain of events that also seemed unlikely. But, a lot of stuff happens in any given year making such chains more common than you would think.
You are in a locked room with 9 idiots each holding a granade. What's your life expectancy?
Even worse, with even more particle physics, gene engineering, nanotechnology, artificial intelligence etc. you'll be soon locked up in a room with 7 billion idiots each holding a granade, a bazooka and a flame-thrower.
On one hand, you've been locked in the room with a slowly growing group of idiots for decades and nobody has started throwing grenades, at least not since John threw a couple of them when he got excited after being the first one in the room. On the other hand, Ivan keeps making strange faces at his grenade, Ali is playing "guess where I hid the grenade" and keeps getting into fistfights with Sanjay, Kim just barged in with a new grenade and keeps shouting at everyone, and John suddenly seems a lot more enthusiastic about blowing shit up real good.
Two serious fallacies here:
1) The risk posed by nuclear war is correlated across nearly every individual, so the odds ratio between risks posed to you as an individual and nuclear war is of no use to the practice of risk management in such policy matters.
2) You are comparing the study of things entirely outside our control (volcanos), and potential doom which is entirely of our own making, towards the end of maintaining control by holding the world under the constant threat of annihilation.
I'm not sure that I entirely agree with this assessment.
One of the very interesting things I got out of reading Command And Control by Eric Schlosser, was the number of very severe accidents that have happened in the US in the handling of nuclear weapons. While probably somewhat overstated, to me it basically makes a case that the US is lucky it hasn't nuked itself by accident (and some of the stories told in that book are incredible, I enjoyed that book).
Also, some of the stories make the case about how abysmal the care and prudence was around handling these weapons, such as the reluctance for years to even put codes on the weapons, or when they were forced to, setting every code to 0000. While I do believe the attitude may have changed, I don't know that it's prudent to put unwavering faith into the people handling these arms, based on what's told in this book.
While I don't want to say you suffer from this, I've seen what I believe to be a miss-allocation of risk in some of the engineering roles I've worked at. What I mean by this, is that because an event hasn't happened, or hasn't happened recently, that we believe the risk has changed. I've literally been part of a discussion on why do we need backups, because we've never restored from one.
If I understand correctly, this was the sort of philosophy that led to the challenger explosion, we launched the rocket before and it didn't explode, so why would it happen this time. To me, this is a fallacy of risk, previous events or recent history don't change the risk.
So while you're right, the risk that a nuclear accident happens, compared to a tornado or flooding happening is much different, doesn't mean that a nuclear accident won't happen. I also highly suspect, that if a nuclear armed country accidentally nukes itself, it would grip the world in a much different way than any tornado or flood. And may change your well-being in very dramatic way's, especially if one doesn't realize it was even an accident to begin with.
So it was not actually eight zeros (or four) but apparently 6 zeroes (000000) and effectively the "key under the doormat" (in the safe with the key in the same base as the rocket, the opposite of what was claimed then). The procedure was more complex than just keying in zeroes, but everything was surely trained on the rehearsals.
Now, imagine somebody just and only once forgets to apply the "it's just a rehearsal" command.
What's the "acceptable" probability some city being successfully targeted, even only and just once, especially knowing that it can trigger the retaliation?
The logic of the nuclear war is: "if the rockets come to you, you have to send yours to them, because otherwise they won!" -- they think it's better that the civilization gets wiped out than to appear to be a "chicken." Even a kind of semi-automated response surely exists.
>The logic of the nuclear war is: "if the rockets come to you, you have to send yours to them, because otherwise they won!" -- they think it's better that the civilization gets wiped out than to appear to be a "chicken." Even a kind of semi-automated response surely exists.
Isn't the idea behind Mutually Assured Destruction not some ego battle, but a deterrent? If nuking another country definitely results in one's own country being nuked, that provides a clear incentive towards self-preservation and not nuking that country in the first place.
It's actually very interesting. I don't remember if it was from Command and Control, or somewhere else, that I once read a story along the lines of.
When the missile launch crews, routinely were tested. And something along the lines of a set of codes was used for a test launch. And a different set of codes was used for a real launch. On one of these tests, the real launch codes were used by mistake. But due to the crew asking for confirmation several times, the person eventually noticed their mistake and cancelled the order. But if I understand/remember correctly, strictly speaking these crews were given a valid launch command.
While I didn't find my source for that particular example, I do believe it does happen where training and real have gotten mixed up. The most famous of which, is I think when the operator used a training tape in the early warning system, which caused the US to think they were under attack.
> The logic of the nuclear war is: "if the rockets come to you, you have to send yours to them, because otherwise they won!" -- they think it's better that the civilization gets wiped out than to appear to be a "chicken." Even a kind of semi-automated response surely exists.
The semi-automated response is a good thing, it makes your commitment to retaliate even more certain.
This is because the enemy is typically expected to be aware of your capability, rational, and selfish. If they know that you won't fire the rockets back in response, they CAN win, and they might use their weapons. If they won't win, they won't fire the rockets in the first place.
Now, to be precise, the important part of the scheme is only that the enemy thinks you will fire the rocket. After the rockets are launched towards you, it doesn't matter anymore, and yes, you could (and should) nobly self-sacrifice your nation so that humanity survives. But any suggestion or expectation that this will happen makes it more likely that the enemy will call your bluff and destroy you.
Honestly, with this logic in consideration, it makes me wonder if some of the rumors and leaks about how close we have been to launching counterattacks are fabricated. Though given the risk of espionage, it's probably safer to simply not bluff.
All this falls apart if the enemy is either unaware of or disbelieving in your retaliation, so they might fire their missiles expecting you to not fire back. Or if they're irrational, failing to understand that they will not win. Or if they're not selfish (perhaps the scariest of the possibilities): Perhaps because they are suicidal, which could be considered a sub-class of irrational. Or because they think you will not retaliate against them, instead retaliating against someone else: For example, if through subterfuge the US could fire Pakistani missiles at North Korea, not being dissuaded by North Korea's retaliation against Pakistan because the destruction would be on a different continent, or for example the military or political leadership initiating the attack are in another country, or better yet, on another planet) and not personally harmed by their own country being destroyed.
I completely agree that the world would be a safer place if these weapons did not exist. Unfortunately, they do, and we're neither able to modify physics so that they don't, nor to unanimously agree that no use them, so we're stuck with this sub-optimal equilibrium.
>The logic of the nuclear war is: "if the rockets come to you, you have to send yours to them, because otherwise they won!"
That's not at all true. The logic of nuclear war is that your enemy must believe with a high degree of certainty that you will launch if attacked. Whether you actually do or not is beside the point.
I keep reading that the launch codes were set to zeroes in news articles but every technical document I read says the code was only used in Permissive Action Link devices. As I understand it, these PALs were mechanisms that prevented the nuclear weapon from arming so even if the code was accidentally put into the weapon it wouldn't actually detonate until the ICBM launch sequence was initiated (by a separate process) and the warhead detonation mechanism fired. They are a safety feature that was added on to nuclear weapons starting in the late 50's, not some sort of detonation or launch control system.
That said, the PALs weren't fitted to the entire US arsenal until the late 80's so lots of nukes had mechanical keys for decades. Hopefully they took the rehearsal part more seriously than the security of the arsenal...
Besides my families well being, I'm terrified I won't have the money to rebuild my meager home after a catastrophe.
I read my homeowner's policy every few years, and it's for all practical purposes worthless. I keep it out of tradition.
It literally covers less, and less each year. As it stands now, my home would have to burn down for it to kick in. Fires where I live just don't happen. Plus, houses just don't burn down like they used to.
I feel my family has a good chance of surviving a catastrophe.
We wouldn't make it homeless though.
(I'm really wondering why I keep paying that huge premium each year. I wish our representatives would demand better coverage from insurance companies. It seems like the biggest racket going?)
> A nuclear catastrophe, statistically, poses a much lower risk to my well being than tornado season.
The probability may be lower. But the consequences are way, way, way, way, way bigger.(I am assuming nuclear catastrophe means nuclear war.)
From a personal point of view. A heart attack or cancer it is much bigger risk. You die and the world ends for you. But from the point of view of humanity. A nuclear war it is a much higher risk, since it would jeopardize our future.
I think people are worried. But we have a split personality these days, of what is visible online and in the media vs. us older silent generations. The younger generation is more vocal online, and they are not as worried. I could speculate about how they did not grow up in the cold war, blah, blah, blah, whatever the reason is... but their lack of worry is more visible online and in the media. All the while, myself and my friends in our 40s and 50s are all worried. But we also all grew up in constant fear of it, so it is the same comfortable worry from our childhood, and we shrug it off instead of freaking out.
We (the US and allies) have been smacking the middle East hornet's nest for 25 years through invasions, occupations, dictator toppling, drone striking, antagonizing allies (Israel), antagonizing adversaries (Russia vis a vis Ukraine and now a half-assed proxy war efforts in Syria following the laughable "Russian reset"). Foreign policy hubris and fecklessness combined.
And NOW suddenly we're supposed to be afraid of a total nuclear war? Don't insult my intelligence.
Exactly my point, excuse me if I wasn't clear: these things you list are not new concerns.
I simply bristle at the notion that I should suddenly live in fear because a carnival barker I don't like just won an election. The US federal government has been a hot mess since the early 1900's. NOW I'm suddenly supposed to be alarmed?
I consider anyone who suggests we should grow the federal government in its current configuration to be a busybody or a fool, sorry to be blunt. In my opinion, return power to the states or GTFO.
For me to live in fear of things I can't control is not living. I refuse to snivel. When I can make a positive impact in my sphere, I try to do that; sorry I can't do any better.
I feel it is worth point out some of the terrifying close calls [1] that we've had in the last decades with nuclear weapons. Some people are so sure that because personal experience indicates that it hasn't happened that that is any indications of its likelihood of happening. By all accounts we have this man [2] to thank for at least one of those incidents not resulting in total nuclear apocalypse.
Not to take away from Petrov's accomplishment, but his predecessor's sole call against firing nuclear torpedos during the Cuban Missile Crisis is something I am thankful for every day. The man is Vasili Arkhipov[0].
That doesn't even mention my "favorite" one, when Soviet submarine B-59 was intercepted by American ships during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The submarine had been out of contact for days and had no idea if a war had started. It carried a nuclear torpedo which required the authorization of three people to launch. Two of those people wanted to use it. The third, Vasili Arkhipov, was opposed, and managed to talk them down. If Arkhipov had been in a bad mood that day (maybe he missed his morning coffee or something) the world could have ended up looking very different.
(This was before MAD was fully in place, so in the worst case outcome the US still would have survived the resulting conflict largely intact. Europe and the USSR would have been pretty much obliterated, though.)
I know the story, and I don't really buy it. Exactly what happened between Arkhipov, Savitsky and Maslennikov will never be known. However, the premise that they didn't know if war had broken out or not is very shaky: the fact that the US Navy was using depth charges and not torpedoes on them was quite a clear message that they were not in "shoot to kill" mode.
The wikipedia page on depth charges [1] explains the Cold War usage: "During the Cold War when it was necessary to inform submarines of the other side that they had been detected but without actually launching an attack, low-power "signalling depth charges" (also called "practice depth charges") were sometimes used, powerful enough to be detected when no other means of communication was possible, but not destructive."
My question would be: is that Cold War usage what prompted this action during the Cuban Missile Crisis, or was it invented for the Crisis and continued from there? (Sincere question, I have no idea.)
> Some people are so sure that because personal experience indicates that it hasn't happened that that is any indications of its likelihood of happening.
Nope, that's not it. People aren't worrying about it because it's emotionally costly to worry and the optimal strategy for emotional well-being is ignorance.
While it's true that the consequences of a nuclear apocalypse are much more dire on a global scale, the personal consequences are indistinguishable from a car crash, plane crash or...if we wanted to include a natural disaster, death from a dam failure or a volcanic eruption.
If a typical person worried about every possible way to die today, no matter how minute, that would truly be a miserable experience. Besides, in the case of nuclear apocalypse it is literally impossible to adopt a strategy that minimizes your chances of death in the case it actually occurs, barring moving to the middle of nowhere and digging yourself a deep personal bunker.
So the only reasonable strategy is to ignore it entirely, in which case the likelihood of it happening is irrelevant.
I think you are right mostly, its probably more that than anything but I do think people allow a very limited observational ability to give them a feeling for how likely something is, despite the fact that they cannot really internally measure it at all just based on the facts they observe in daily life. I think people use a similar reasoning to assume Trump (or anyone else) could ever be a serious threat to our democracy simply because things "never seem to change" no matter who is in power, which I think is equally irrational.
>So the only reasonable strategy is to ignore it entirely
I think that is pretty overkill, to me the only reasonable strategy is to take what actions you reasonably can (be aware of what is going on in the world, communicate your concerns to your representatives, not elect a madman who talks about nuclear weapons as if they were a nerf gun) and then you can only sit back and relax. Electing someone who expresses a desire to use nuclear weapons is a pretty direct way to have control over whether they are used (and subsequently destroy the world), so nobody can pretend that they have no control over it.
There is a third option. The vast majority of people I've met [SF Bay Area] have no clue how easily a nuclear accident, let alone a nuclear war, could occur.
The generation growing up with Reagan had the ability to 'choose' option 2; later generations raised by those 'choosing not to think about it' are literally unequipped to understand. Perry is telling the truth, & I know this by personal experience.
Source: My dad was in the thick of compartmentalized NSA projects; I was writing book reports re. NORAD & MAD in 7th grade.
TBH, I don't fear nuclear war with a nation like Russia or China anytime soon. Neither country has a deathwish or a desire to end the world. What does really scare me is the possibility of a terrorist attack involving nukes. A dirty bomb that goes off anywhere in the downtown of a major city. I'm glad that this hasn't happened in the past 10 years, but that isn't a very long time. Given the pace of technology, and the inevitable slipups that will happen, the cynic in me thinks it's only a matter of time.
The point of a dirty bomb is less so the actual effects of the radiation, and moreso the impression it gives and the fear it generates. The public is not easily reassured that an area that's been deliberately contaminated with radioactive particles has been sufficiently cleaned up to return. It's the doubt and uncertainty that really counts.
And they are quite doable as weapons - it just takes some careful preparation and handling, and access to some mildly expensive materials.
He managed to contaminate his neighborhood using almost nothing but smoke detector components. How difficult would it be to collect smoke detector parts? You can easily find them used for cheap or free at garage sales and thrift stores. If there were a concerted effort to acquire the parts using only cash, it wouldn't take very long to gather up enough of the material...
...at that point, you just need the delivery device, and we all know that isn't difficult to procure or produce (all the parts can be easily bought at Walmart).
TBH, I'm surprised it hasn't happened yet; as a terrorist weapon, it wouldn't matter that it didn't cause mass death via radiation poisoning (not in the near term at least), but that it has the perception to do so. At the very least, it would make people less likely to visit the "hot zone" left over afterward (in a financially important city area it might lead to economic problems).
Whatever I have read is that it's really very difficult to first obtain enough radioactive material and then to spread it out. The same is true for biological weapons. Even if you have a very dangerous virus you still have to contaminate a large enough number of people.
Much easier to buy guns and shoot people or run a truck into a crowd.
Getting the material is not that difficult for a determined group. Truly dangerous isotopes like caesium-137 or strontium-90 are both used for medical and other applications, and have both been accidentally released from non-military sources after having been forgotten in scrapyards, then causing fatalities. They also have considerable half-lives, about 30 years, so you can't just wait a few months for it to decay out of an area. Dispersing them is also not that hard, and you don't even necessarily have to use an explosive. You could do an indoors release of a powder, or a release of a water-soluble salt into a pond or a fountain, or what have you.
Of course, other motivations, like the panic generated by a physical attack, may be more important to someone choosing methods.
Well, nuclear terrorism isn't something easy to do.
Yes, the amount of complexity of preparation terrorists are able to get away with today is amusing. But grabbing a nuclear bomb is in a completely different mark, and successfully launching one is still a completely different level of complexity.
This isn't meant to exhibit a personal paranoia, but is it reasonable to keep the prospect of terrorism more in scope if we allow for hacking efforts that would exploit security vulnerabilities in existing systems? Gut feel (no basis, though) is that it may be more likely to take that approach than the steal-materials-and-build-and-launch one.
All it takes is a coup of a nuclear-armed nation, and the barrier to entry on that project keeps dropping as states with a recent history of fanatic-deposes-weaker-fanatic coups join the club.
The sinking feeling you get when you think you dodged a bullet and realize it's actually a very determined smart bomb who really, really wants to be with you...
The article I think specifies an important aspect to the world security situation that we must keep in mind constantly.
It's worth adding context to the article, which breezes past some controversial bits maybe a bit too easily: for instance it writes "how to maximize the fearsome deterrent power of the U.S. arsenal, how to minimize the possibility that the old Soviet arsenal would obliterate the United States and much of the planet along the way". This places the blame of mutually assured destruction and global thermonuclear war, almost entirely on the Soviet Union.
The US's nuclear deterrent is "fearsome". The Soviet Union has an "arsenal" (not a deterrent?), which would obliterate the whole planet.
I'm sure the author didn't intend to do this, but he's contributing to the problem. The United States and Russia - as well as other nuclear powers - are partners in a dialogue. They share responsibility for the outcomes of the security situation, and for avoiding falling into security dilemmas. One can deeply criticize America for the nuclear security situation we are today, as it has done by far the most to weaken the now-stalled nuclear arms agreements (START, etc) that had once been in place. (This of course doesn't meet the bar for the article).
When both sides start by accusing one another, they have to work back to a position where they can find common ground.
When both sides are realistic, and accept their own blame there's a place to work from.
For instance - it should not be controversial for an American to accept that the Soviet Union had a nuclear deterrent during the Cold War and to call it by such. Similarly we should accept that the US has a nuclear arsenal today (the US is a nuclear first-strike nation by policy) that, if used, would destroy most of the world.
Much of the rest of the piece is similarly written with an undercurrent of us versus them, with "them" getting the lionshare of the blame even though it does not cohere with history.
If you start the conversation with us versus them, you start the conversation with zero-sum mentality: the type of pitfall that led to the Cold War and its escalation to begin with.
There is no good versus evil. Other nations have National Security interests too. Do the god damn hard work to deconflict as much of this as possible. Do the god damn hard work to build and maintain transparent dialog. Do the god damn hard work to eliminate strategic surprise, and the possibility for strategic surprise.
That's certainly not true. The fundamental "strategy" of the cold war, specifically the production of ~70,000 nuclear weapons, was about ensuring that no aggressor would survive. Submarine-launched missles are the primary tactic.
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 156 ms ] threadhttp://www.commandandcontrolfilm.com/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threads
"In a best-case Trump scenario, he bumbles around for four years doing not much except embarrassing himself and the country."
This guy does not have a history of bumbling around. He seems to be quite an effective man of action. I think you "embarrass" yourself by starting an analysis with that paragraph.
Then a bit down below you say:
"It can be fun to have secret, unchecked powers when your guy is in office, but is incredibly dangerous when the other guy does."
It can be "fun" to have leadership with "unchecked power"?
Man, get over your totalitarian urges before you decide to play cassandra for the rest of us who do not think it "fun" at all, under any circumstances, to have leaders with "secret unchecked powers" in our Republic.
[fix minor typos]
I agree and I've tried to explain that to my conservative friends and co-workers but it never quite makes it through. Because Sharia law and death-panels never came to be a lot of them feel fine in brushing off my concerns about Trump, despite the complete false equivalency between the two.
http://www.npr.org/2016/10/04/496596466/how-donald-trump-los...
"How Donald Trump Lost $916 Million"
Paul Allen lost $15-$20 billion across dozens of poor business decisions spanning decades. That doesn't mean he's an idiot or ineffectual. He also still has $20 billion.
Trump lost $916 million? He has ~$4 billion. So that just makes him more effective than 99.999% of all business people on earth, right?
Successfull as a con man can be.
Giving the money of his father to an index fund would result in the same or more wealth today. But he got to be so "visible" this way... up to becoming a president for being a known TV face.
He started with a lot of money and a family business and has done well, but the organization is not that big and not very remarkable if you ignore the marketing. I realize "he is the president" is a pretty good counterargument to "he's not an effective man of action", but hopefully you understand what I'm saying. I think his record is somewhere in between "bumbling around" and "man of action", probably a little closer to bumbling if you look at all his failures.
As to what constitutes effective "action" for a developer, sure he didn't lay bricks, but he made the deals, got the (opportunistic) tax breaks, and managed to fix up properties that were sitting stagnant. The Commodore Hotel, for example. And this same media that is ragging on him used to nauseate people like me who don't worship the shiny metal with its pimping of Mr. Trump.
And failures in business are par per course. If failure in a business venture makes a person a bumbler, then what to make of our current business hero's statement that "failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough"? (That was Elon Musk, btw.)
Did you see his tweet against the GOP's gutting of the Ethics Office? He still has the ear of millions of Americans and will continue to have that ear for the next 4 years. To think that he isn't going to be able to use that to his advantage is naïve. This is someone who has literally been shaping US foreign policy over Twitter. The "he's at his peak and can't do much more from here" line of thought has been brought up since the Republican primaries and it is as wrong now as it was then.
And he does have the ear of half the country, but in the past it has seemed like he's really only good at marketing himself, not so much his products and businesses. So of course he can use his followers to his advantage, but I don't see a lot of evidence that he will use that advantage well. Being able to push something through Congress doesn't mean he'll be able to make it work and make people buy into it.
I took the "best case" to mean that Trump is so caught up in his daily Twitter fueds (Arnold Schwarzenegger today) to push any significant legislative changes or start a war. Clearly Trump has had some degree of success in the business and marketing world.
Personally I think Trump knows exactly what he is doing when he makes outrageous public statements or goes after someone (distracting from issues like Russia, his conflicts of interest, the repeal of the ACA etc), but it's not a great leap to see how that behavior could cause issues in the world of international diplomacy. He has already made comments about nuclear proliferation, nuclear arms races, the one China policy, and the role of Russia in our recent election cycle. The linked article alludes to how quickly normality can spiral out of control especially if everyone assumes "it can't happen".
"The same question I asked my parents: how could you let Hitler come to power? And their answer sounds frightening familiar: it sort of happened (he was elected after all), he promised to make the country great again and everybody thought that once in power, the guy would settle and not do too much damage.
Well, we all know how that ended. And that guy didn’t have a nuclear button. This one has."
- A citizen of this planet: January 4, 2017 at 4:06 am
Maybe it's because you write shit like this. Condescending doesn't even begin to describe your last paragraph.
If I were to begin arguing why your article is wrong, one thing would be that you overestimate the amount of power a president has, despite being commander in chief. There are too many vested interests operating behind what is publicly seen, that would not allow a nuclear apocalypse to happen.
>“I do not think it is a probability this year or next year or anytime in the foreseeable future. But the consequence is so great, we have to take it seriously. And there are things to greatly lower those possibilities that we’re simply not doing.”
A nuclear catastrophe, statistically, poses a much lower risk to my well being than tornado season. Also occasional flash flooding, especially while driving. Oh, and extremely dry summers with little rain that make for wildfire conditions. Also, there's heat stroke if I'm being active...I guess what I mean is I do believe, deep down, that there are people who genuinely care and will work on such serious matters.
Serious people who take things seriously. I applaud them and hope my tax dollars support them appropriately, public and/or private sector. Sort of like geologists working to study the devastating potential of fault lines or volcanic activity. After seeing what extreme weather can do, and how resilient the US population seems to be, I'm honestly grateful to not have to have "Duck and Cover" as part of my everyday psyche.
> Perry wishes more people were familiar with the concept of “expected value.” That is a statistical way of understanding events of very large magnitude that have a low probability. The large magnitude event could be something good, like winning a lottery ticket. Or it could be something bad, like a nuclear bomb exploding. Because the odds of winning the lottery are so low, the rational thing is to save your money and not buy the ticket. As for a nuclear explosion, by Perry’s lights, the consequences are so grave that the rational thing would be for people in the United States and everywhere to be in a state of peak alarm about their vulnerability, and for political debate to be dominated by discussion of how to reduce the risk.
It took a long time to get to the article's actual suggestions (eliminate all ICBMS?); until that, this was just fear mongering.
i find his paranoia political. we should be a lot more worried about india and pakistan having nuclear weapons than a president who uses twitter.
He speaks out for concern on all of the above. The article states he hopes to meet with Trump & Mattis to work with him and give his advice.
as to whether we should be concerned, where was this article five months ago? it's thinly veiled political commentary.
http://www.wjperryproject.org/
If you want to disagree with him, then give an argument. However if you want to do a quick smear and dodge then keep repeating that it's "thinly veiled political commentary" over and over again.
Would three months ago count, or does it need to be exactly five? http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/30/opinion/why-its-safe-to-sc...
> I would guess
Based on what? Unless it's based on something similar to where you got the 0.1% risk for a tornado it's no more accurate a guess than if you had said 0.01% or 1% or 80%.
I'm not making any claim to accuracy. That's why I used the word "guess."
Note that the comment I replied to implies that the risk of a nuclear holocaust is "much lower" than 0.1% per year. Why aren't you hassling them about that claim too? Unlike me, they just stated it as if it were a plain fact.
In all seriousness, calculating a probability of death from nuclear calamity isn't going to be possible without a great number of caveats and assumptions. It isn't like a meteor strike, because we at least have some record of that stretching back a long time. It's also not like meteor strikes because I believe the disaster generating process (people with buttons wired to faulty / hackable control systems) to be a giant mess of scary.
EX: "Solar Sunrise" is not that old and the US was seriously considering using nukes as NORAD was having major issues. IMO, large scale nuclear war was still unlikely, but the odds where probably well over 1% that year.
PS: Remember, WWI started from a chain of events that also seemed unlikely. But, a lot of stuff happens in any given year making such chains more common than you would think.
You are in a locked room with 9 idiots each holding a granade. What's your life expectancy?
Even worse, with even more particle physics, gene engineering, nanotechnology, artificial intelligence etc. you'll be soon locked up in a room with 7 billion idiots each holding a granade, a bazooka and a flame-thrower.
One of the very interesting things I got out of reading Command And Control by Eric Schlosser, was the number of very severe accidents that have happened in the US in the handling of nuclear weapons. While probably somewhat overstated, to me it basically makes a case that the US is lucky it hasn't nuked itself by accident (and some of the stories told in that book are incredible, I enjoyed that book).
Also, some of the stories make the case about how abysmal the care and prudence was around handling these weapons, such as the reluctance for years to even put codes on the weapons, or when they were forced to, setting every code to 0000. While I do believe the attitude may have changed, I don't know that it's prudent to put unwavering faith into the people handling these arms, based on what's told in this book.
While I don't want to say you suffer from this, I've seen what I believe to be a miss-allocation of risk in some of the engineering roles I've worked at. What I mean by this, is that because an event hasn't happened, or hasn't happened recently, that we believe the risk has changed. I've literally been part of a discussion on why do we need backups, because we've never restored from one.
If I understand correctly, this was the sort of philosophy that led to the challenger explosion, we launched the rocket before and it didn't explode, so why would it happen this time. To me, this is a fallacy of risk, previous events or recent history don't change the risk.
So while you're right, the risk that a nuclear accident happens, compared to a tornado or flooding happening is much different, doesn't mean that a nuclear accident won't happen. I also highly suspect, that if a nuclear armed country accidentally nukes itself, it would grip the world in a much different way than any tornado or flood. And may change your well-being in very dramatic way's, especially if one doesn't realize it was even an accident to begin with.
edit: minor grammatical mistakes
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/12/launch-code-for-u...
"Launch code for US nukes was 00000000 for 20 years"
http://foreignpolicy.com/2014/01/21/air-force-swears-our-nuk...
So it was not actually eight zeros (or four) but apparently 6 zeroes (000000) and effectively the "key under the doormat" (in the safe with the key in the same base as the rocket, the opposite of what was claimed then). The procedure was more complex than just keying in zeroes, but everything was surely trained on the rehearsals.
Now, imagine somebody just and only once forgets to apply the "it's just a rehearsal" command.
What's the "acceptable" probability some city being successfully targeted, even only and just once, especially knowing that it can trigger the retaliation?
The logic of the nuclear war is: "if the rockets come to you, you have to send yours to them, because otherwise they won!" -- they think it's better that the civilization gets wiped out than to appear to be a "chicken." Even a kind of semi-automated response surely exists.
Isn't the idea behind Mutually Assured Destruction not some ego battle, but a deterrent? If nuking another country definitely results in one's own country being nuked, that provides a clear incentive towards self-preservation and not nuking that country in the first place.
When the missile launch crews, routinely were tested. And something along the lines of a set of codes was used for a test launch. And a different set of codes was used for a real launch. On one of these tests, the real launch codes were used by mistake. But due to the crew asking for confirmation several times, the person eventually noticed their mistake and cancelled the order. But if I understand/remember correctly, strictly speaking these crews were given a valid launch command.
While I didn't find my source for that particular example, I do believe it does happen where training and real have gotten mixed up. The most famous of which, is I think when the operator used a training tape in the early warning system, which caused the US to think they were under attack.
https://www.damninteresting.com/the-apocalypses-that-might-h...
The semi-automated response is a good thing, it makes your commitment to retaliate even more certain.
This is because the enemy is typically expected to be aware of your capability, rational, and selfish. If they know that you won't fire the rockets back in response, they CAN win, and they might use their weapons. If they won't win, they won't fire the rockets in the first place.
Now, to be precise, the important part of the scheme is only that the enemy thinks you will fire the rocket. After the rockets are launched towards you, it doesn't matter anymore, and yes, you could (and should) nobly self-sacrifice your nation so that humanity survives. But any suggestion or expectation that this will happen makes it more likely that the enemy will call your bluff and destroy you.
Honestly, with this logic in consideration, it makes me wonder if some of the rumors and leaks about how close we have been to launching counterattacks are fabricated. Though given the risk of espionage, it's probably safer to simply not bluff.
All this falls apart if the enemy is either unaware of or disbelieving in your retaliation, so they might fire their missiles expecting you to not fire back. Or if they're irrational, failing to understand that they will not win. Or if they're not selfish (perhaps the scariest of the possibilities): Perhaps because they are suicidal, which could be considered a sub-class of irrational. Or because they think you will not retaliate against them, instead retaliating against someone else: For example, if through subterfuge the US could fire Pakistani missiles at North Korea, not being dissuaded by North Korea's retaliation against Pakistan because the destruction would be on a different continent, or for example the military or political leadership initiating the attack are in another country, or better yet, on another planet) and not personally harmed by their own country being destroyed.
I completely agree that the world would be a safer place if these weapons did not exist. Unfortunately, they do, and we're neither able to modify physics so that they don't, nor to unanimously agree that no use them, so we're stuck with this sub-optimal equilibrium.
That's not at all true. The logic of nuclear war is that your enemy must believe with a high degree of certainty that you will launch if attacked. Whether you actually do or not is beside the point.
That said, the PALs weren't fitted to the entire US arsenal until the late 80's so lots of nukes had mechanical keys for decades. Hopefully they took the rehearsal part more seriously than the security of the arsenal...
I read my homeowner's policy every few years, and it's for all practical purposes worthless. I keep it out of tradition.
It literally covers less, and less each year. As it stands now, my home would have to burn down for it to kick in. Fires where I live just don't happen. Plus, houses just don't burn down like they used to.
I feel my family has a good chance of surviving a catastrophe.
We wouldn't make it homeless though.
(I'm really wondering why I keep paying that huge premium each year. I wish our representatives would demand better coverage from insurance companies. It seems like the biggest racket going?)
The probability may be lower. But the consequences are way, way, way, way, way bigger.(I am assuming nuclear catastrophe means nuclear war.)
From a personal point of view. A heart attack or cancer it is much bigger risk. You die and the world ends for you. But from the point of view of humanity. A nuclear war it is a much higher risk, since it would jeopardize our future.
But more seriously, low grade poorly trained sub intelligent AI seems a lot more likely to fuck up a lot more people's lives than nuclear Armageddon.
There is an interesting movie called "Threads", a BBC drama by Barry Hines. Be sure to watch it.
And NOW suddenly we're supposed to be afraid of a total nuclear war? Don't insult my intelligence.
I've been terrified of nuclear war, terrorism, accidents, pollution since I can remember.
Don't pretend this is a new concern.
I simply bristle at the notion that I should suddenly live in fear because a carnival barker I don't like just won an election. The US federal government has been a hot mess since the early 1900's. NOW I'm suddenly supposed to be alarmed?
I consider anyone who suggests we should grow the federal government in its current configuration to be a busybody or a fool, sorry to be blunt. In my opinion, return power to the states or GTFO.
For me to live in fear of things I can't control is not living. I refuse to snivel. When I can make a positive impact in my sphere, I try to do that; sorry I can't do any better.
[1] http://www.ucsusa.org/nuclear-weapons/hair-trigger-alert/clo...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasili_Arkhipov
(This was before MAD was fully in place, so in the worst case outcome the US still would have survived the resulting conflict largely intact. Europe and the USSR would have been pretty much obliterated, though.)
The wikipedia page on depth charges [1] explains the Cold War usage: "During the Cold War when it was necessary to inform submarines of the other side that they had been detected but without actually launching an attack, low-power "signalling depth charges" (also called "practice depth charges") were sometimes used, powerful enough to be detected when no other means of communication was possible, but not destructive."
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depth_charge#Signaling
Nope, that's not it. People aren't worrying about it because it's emotionally costly to worry and the optimal strategy for emotional well-being is ignorance.
While it's true that the consequences of a nuclear apocalypse are much more dire on a global scale, the personal consequences are indistinguishable from a car crash, plane crash or...if we wanted to include a natural disaster, death from a dam failure or a volcanic eruption.
If a typical person worried about every possible way to die today, no matter how minute, that would truly be a miserable experience. Besides, in the case of nuclear apocalypse it is literally impossible to adopt a strategy that minimizes your chances of death in the case it actually occurs, barring moving to the middle of nowhere and digging yourself a deep personal bunker.
So the only reasonable strategy is to ignore it entirely, in which case the likelihood of it happening is irrelevant.
I think you are right mostly, its probably more that than anything but I do think people allow a very limited observational ability to give them a feeling for how likely something is, despite the fact that they cannot really internally measure it at all just based on the facts they observe in daily life. I think people use a similar reasoning to assume Trump (or anyone else) could ever be a serious threat to our democracy simply because things "never seem to change" no matter who is in power, which I think is equally irrational.
>So the only reasonable strategy is to ignore it entirely
I think that is pretty overkill, to me the only reasonable strategy is to take what actions you reasonably can (be aware of what is going on in the world, communicate your concerns to your representatives, not elect a madman who talks about nuclear weapons as if they were a nerf gun) and then you can only sit back and relax. Electing someone who expresses a desire to use nuclear weapons is a pretty direct way to have control over whether they are used (and subsequently destroy the world), so nobody can pretend that they have no control over it.
The generation growing up with Reagan had the ability to 'choose' option 2; later generations raised by those 'choosing not to think about it' are literally unequipped to understand. Perry is telling the truth, & I know this by personal experience.
Source: My dad was in the thick of compartmentalized NSA projects; I was writing book reports re. NORAD & MAD in 7th grade.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/10/opinion/a-nuclear-9-11.htm...
And they are quite doable as weapons - it just takes some careful preparation and handling, and access to some mildly expensive materials.
I'm not even sure that's necessary, if all you want to do is create terror...?
For instance, read about David Hahn (aka, the "Nuclear Boy Scout") who recently passed away (of what, they don't say):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hahn
He managed to contaminate his neighborhood using almost nothing but smoke detector components. How difficult would it be to collect smoke detector parts? You can easily find them used for cheap or free at garage sales and thrift stores. If there were a concerted effort to acquire the parts using only cash, it wouldn't take very long to gather up enough of the material...
...at that point, you just need the delivery device, and we all know that isn't difficult to procure or produce (all the parts can be easily bought at Walmart).
TBH, I'm surprised it hasn't happened yet; as a terrorist weapon, it wouldn't matter that it didn't cause mass death via radiation poisoning (not in the near term at least), but that it has the perception to do so. At the very least, it would make people less likely to visit the "hot zone" left over afterward (in a financially important city area it might lead to economic problems).
Much easier to buy guns and shoot people or run a truck into a crowd.
Of course, other motivations, like the panic generated by a physical attack, may be more important to someone choosing methods.
Yes, the amount of complexity of preparation terrorists are able to get away with today is amusing. But grabbing a nuclear bomb is in a completely different mark, and successfully launching one is still a completely different level of complexity.
It's worth adding context to the article, which breezes past some controversial bits maybe a bit too easily: for instance it writes "how to maximize the fearsome deterrent power of the U.S. arsenal, how to minimize the possibility that the old Soviet arsenal would obliterate the United States and much of the planet along the way". This places the blame of mutually assured destruction and global thermonuclear war, almost entirely on the Soviet Union.
The US's nuclear deterrent is "fearsome". The Soviet Union has an "arsenal" (not a deterrent?), which would obliterate the whole planet.
I'm sure the author didn't intend to do this, but he's contributing to the problem. The United States and Russia - as well as other nuclear powers - are partners in a dialogue. They share responsibility for the outcomes of the security situation, and for avoiding falling into security dilemmas. One can deeply criticize America for the nuclear security situation we are today, as it has done by far the most to weaken the now-stalled nuclear arms agreements (START, etc) that had once been in place. (This of course doesn't meet the bar for the article).
When both sides start by accusing one another, they have to work back to a position where they can find common ground.
When both sides are realistic, and accept their own blame there's a place to work from.
For instance - it should not be controversial for an American to accept that the Soviet Union had a nuclear deterrent during the Cold War and to call it by such. Similarly we should accept that the US has a nuclear arsenal today (the US is a nuclear first-strike nation by policy) that, if used, would destroy most of the world.
Much of the rest of the piece is similarly written with an undercurrent of us versus them, with "them" getting the lionshare of the blame even though it does not cohere with history.
If you start the conversation with us versus them, you start the conversation with zero-sum mentality: the type of pitfall that led to the Cold War and its escalation to begin with.
There is no good versus evil. Other nations have National Security interests too. Do the god damn hard work to deconflict as much of this as possible. Do the god damn hard work to build and maintain transparent dialog. Do the god damn hard work to eliminate strategic surprise, and the possibility for strategic surprise.
And in the meantime, stop pointing fingers.
The one who attacks first