Great, let's fuck up the existing MAD balance. That'll end well... MAD appears to have worked, and this is likely because there was a long lag time between missile/bomber launch and impact. The...
Great, let's fuck up the existing MAD balance. That'll end well...
MAD appears to have worked, and this is likely because there was a long lag time between missile/bomber launch and impact. The target had >30 minutes to launch their missiles/bombers, so everyone dumb enough to play the game was guaranteed to be wrecked. This arrangement won't work if the response window is shortened to <15 minutes. A first strike will look much more enticing. It may be the best strategic move if an adversary also has hypersonic missiles. If a state decides not to strike first, then they'll likely become hypersensitive to anything that resembles a missile flying in their direction, which may lead to an accidental first strike. I do not think this will end well, especially once nuclear warheads are attached.
Bad idea. An automated response to a false positive would doom the world. There are historical examples where human intervention averted catastrophe when sensors & computers were confident they...
Bad idea. An automated response to a false positive would doom the world. There are historical examples where human intervention averted catastrophe when sensors & computers were confident they had detected an attack. If the human was not in the equation at those times we'd have had a nuclear exchange.
September 26, 1983. A Soviet early warning satellite showed that the United States had launched five land-based missiles at the Soviet Union. The alert came at a time of high tension between the two countries, due in part to the U.S. military buildup in the early 1980s and President Ronald Reagan’s anti-Soviet rhetoric. In addition, earlier in the month the Soviet Union shot down a Korean Airlines passenger plane that strayed into its airspace, killing almost 300 people. The Soviet officer on duty had only minutes to decide whether or not the satellite data were a false alarm. Since the satellite was found to be operating properly, following procedures would have led him to report an incoming attack. Going partly on gut instinct and believing the United States was unlikely to fire only five missiles, he told his commanders that it was a false alarm before he knew that to be true. Later investigations revealed that reflection of the sun on the tops of clouds had fooled the satellite into thinking it was detecting missile launches (Schlosser 2013, p. 447; Hoffman 1999).
October 5, 1960. The U.S. early warning radar at Thule, Greenland, reported to the North American Air Defense (NORAD) Command headquarters in Colorado Springs that it had detected dozens of Soviet missiles launched against the United States. NORAD went to its maximum alert level. The United States later determined that the radar had been fooled by the moonrise over Norway and computers misinterpreted this as an all-out attack on the United States. Fortunately, the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev was in New York at the time, raising doubts that the attack was real (Schlosser 2013, pp. 253–254).
Great, let's fuck up the existing MAD balance. That'll end well...
MAD appears to have worked, and this is likely because there was a long lag time between missile/bomber launch and impact. The target had >30 minutes to launch their missiles/bombers, so everyone dumb enough to play the game was guaranteed to be wrecked. This arrangement won't work if the response window is shortened to <15 minutes. A first strike will look much more enticing. It may be the best strategic move if an adversary also has hypersonic missiles. If a state decides not to strike first, then they'll likely become hypersensitive to anything that resembles a missile flying in their direction, which may lead to an accidental first strike. I do not think this will end well, especially once nuclear warheads are attached.
Bad idea. An automated response to a false positive would doom the world. There are historical examples where human intervention averted catastrophe when sensors & computers were confident they had detected an attack. If the human was not in the equation at those times we'd have had a nuclear exchange.
So the world explodes once the algorithm gets triggered? I hope no one is that confident in their programming abilities
Nuclear Killswitch: Brought to you by Boeing.
Pray we purchase the additional sensor.