Thursday, May 16, 2019

"Everything that could NOT possibly go wrong ..."

Tyler Cowen has an article at Bloomberg: "Nuclear War Is Still Very Possible and Very Scary".

Commentator reaganite88 had this response.
"Great column. I once got to talk to the head of Sandia National Laboratories about how they did analysis of the possibility of an unintentional detonation of a nuclear device. He said they had two teams look at each device... one to think about everything that could possibly go wrong... and another to look at everything that could NOT possibly go wrong. Because the impact of an unintentional detonation was so massive the second team was needed to try to reduce any "black swan" events that the first team could not imagine happening. "
Another commentator, Juan Pablo, noted that "Only a fundamentalist state would launch a nuclear war with MAD. MAD has worked for 70 years."

That was a theme of Dan Simmons's controversial SF novel, 'Flashback'.

It's imaginable to detonate a few nuclear devices if you're a fundamentalist. Global nuclear annihilation is something only America, Russia and China could aspire to. I don't see any Islamic state being on the road to that capability.

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