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Certainly, the chances of a nuclear weapons attack have lessened significantly, but the danger is still very real.

Over 10 thousand nuclear weapons still exist, held by 9 different countries (assuming Israel still has them). That list includes North Korea and Pakistan. I don't have to say anything about North Korea. Pakistan can almost be called an active war zone. Putin appears to be deliberately antagonizing the States, and has just had his primary income source taken away from him. Incidents have come to light that even the nuclear weapons in the United States are not necessarily overseen and maintained correctly. Maybe some of the other 8 countries take better care, but I doubt that all do.

Historians have concluded that we've been damn lucky that we haven't already had a nuclear incident. Some things have changed, definitely lowering the chance of an incident, but not enough to lower it to zero.

It's a common human fallacy: it has never happened, therefore it's not going to happen.

Some experts place the probability of a nuclear incident in the next 10 years at 29%: http://nuclearrisk.org/3likely... That's a lot lower than the 10 year risk during the 60's and 70's, but it's still damn high. Even if they're off by an order of magnitude, a 3% risk of a nuclear incident is still damn scary.

Martin Hellman at Stanford has made a consistent, logical, and compelling counter-argument to this for many years. Purely from a statistical point of view, the longer one waits, the higher the probability of a (possibly accidental) trigger.

To my mind, the assertion that nukes are in any way useful is short-sighted and likely a result of inexperience. The author (Keck) in the OP was a student a couple of years ago, whereas Hellman has had a long and distinguished career at Stanford and elsewhere.

I know who I'm going to listen to first.

From the summary: The history of nuclear command and control systems has too many examples of risky designs that favor the ability to launch over the danger of an accidental one.

[[Citation Needed]]

Seriously - because the claim quoted above is not supported in either of the linked articles. In fact, the citations show precisely the *opposite* - as the PALs were specifically intended to reduce the ability to launch in favor of reducing the risk of accidental launch. That they were improperly used is an operational flaw, not a design flaw. (A difference roughly as subtle as a baseball bat upside the head - and that the writers are unaware of this is a sure and certain sign they aren't qualified to write on the topic.)

The writer of the article cited above further compounds his error by using a situation from over three decades ago as 'proof' that a problem exists today - a situation which his own quote shows to no longer exist.

I've been foloowing this blog/news site over the past months -- it exposes the danger of thenuclear arsenals in qa quite rational way - and the way to address it is just giving more exposure to these rational dangers, sot hat people demand dismantling nuclear weapons over time.

It is certainly worth a look - and an rss feed to follow! http://nuclearrisk.org/

Say what you will about nuclear weapons but they are probably the only reason that humanity hasn't fought World War III yet.

I think that "yet" needs some more emphasis. The current situation appears stable, but just how robust is it? Robustness for MAD needs to extend permanently (at least, millenia). If you were to compare stability of MAD with operating systems, 60 years for MAD is the equivalent of 5 minutes for an operating system. 5 minutes without a crash for an OS won't adequately differentiate the stability of Windows ME from OpenBSD. It's not a sufficient test. Unfortunately, 60 years for MAD feels like a long time in human scale and humans are not optimized for dealing with long term catastrophic risks. Hence we get complacent, and when we get complacent we take stupid risks.

MAD has a series of inputs that will cause the apparently stable system to fail catastrophically. Neither side can be aware of all the inputs, or how the other side processes/perceives its set of inputs. This leads to unwarranted confidence, complacency, and skirting too close to the edge.

This would be an appropriate time to mention Hellman's risk analysis again. http://www.nuclearrisk.org/

Making multiple backup copies protects against losing the secret (the root key in this case), but clearly increases the risk of theft. Secret sharing is the way to backup and still be secure. In a "k out of n" secret sharing system, the secret is divided into n pieces, any k of which allow perfect reconstruction of the secret. What's amazing is that any k-1 tell absolutely nothing about the secret! The easiest to understand is a k-1 out of k system. For example, taking k=5 and assuming the secret is 1000 bits long, the first four pieces of the secret are totally random bit strings, each 1000 bits long. The fifth piece is the XOR of the secret and these four strings. It's not hard to see that any four pieces tell nothing, but all five produce the secret when XORed together. More complex k out of n systems are not too much harder to understand. For example, a 3 out of 5 system can be based on the coefficients (A,B,C) of a quadratic function y = Ax^2 + Bx + C. The coefficients can be determined by any three points (x,y) which lie on the graph. If C is the secret, and the 5 pieces of the secret are five points (x1,y1), (x2,y2), (x3,y3), (x4,y4) and (x5,y5) on the graph, then any 3 of them determine (A,B,C) and hence the secret C. But any 2 or less of them tell us absolutely nothing about C. Arithmetic is done in a finite field so that C is a bit string or similar. Martin Hellman http://www-ee.stanford.edu/~hellman/ http://nuclearrisk.org/

That by itself doesn't justify anything. Two wrongs dont make a right. If I'd do something wrong it doesn't mean you *have* to do something wrong yourself. You stay responsible for your actions, and I for mine.

Other than that I think the gp was trolling, as there's no way we're going to see the situation as it really was over 60 years ago, and there's no way we can see what really would have happened had the USA not dropped two atomic bombs on Japanese cities. We won't know if *one* bomb would have been enough to get the Japanese to capitulate. We simply can't judge.

What we *can* say though, is that the effects of the two atomic bombs have been horrible, aside from the destructive blast the radiation has been causing cancer, death and birth defects for years and years. We've been on the edge of a nuclear war a couple of times already. If that would really happen, half the planet will look like Hiroshima and the rest will suffer severely from the radiation. If the world keeps relying on nuclear detterence sooner or later this will happen.

So what I'd like to suggest, is not to try to put blame on people for mistakes made more than 60 years ago, but learn from them instead and put time and effort into defusing the nuclear threat

Granted, the future is always in flux but the prospects for a large-scale industrial war the likes of WWII are extremely remote.

What are you basing that on? WWII didn't happen in a vacuum. The first thing that happened was the economic rug got pulled out from under the globe -- sound familiar?

http://nuclearrisk.org/soaring_article.php points out how a lot of little, barely-noticed steps can take you to a point that you never imagined could happen. Originally from http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/10/21/1819256...

http://nuclearrisk.org/paper.pdf

It's in the appendix, near the bottom. It definitely is preliminary and not in depth, but that's probably due to a lack of accessible/accurate data.

There's a page "How destructive would a failure of deterrence be?" at the web site which briefly treats both a partial failure like nuclear terrorism and complete failure: http://nuclearrisk.org/2destructive.php That page has links to references with more details, plus my paper accessible at http://nuclearrisk.org/paper.pdf has a longer section on the issue you raise. Mild warning: The paper is about 2 MB. While I'm posting, I'll mention that a number of the posts here seem to miss a key point of my effort. It is not to get my preliminary analysis used as the basis for decision making, but rather as the basis for calling for more detailed studies to either confirm or correct my preliminary conclusion. Hope this helps. Martin Hellman

There's a page "How destructive would a failure of deterrence be?" at the web site which briefly treats both a partial failure like nuclear terrorism and complete failure: http://nuclearrisk.org/2destructive.php That page has links to references with more details, plus my paper accessible at http://nuclearrisk.org/paper.pdf has a longer section on the issue you raise. Mild warning: The paper is about 2 MB. While I'm posting, I'll mention that a number of the posts here seem to miss a key point of my effort. It is not to get my preliminary analysis used as the basis for decision making, but rather as the basis for calling for more detailed studies to either confirm or correct my preliminary conclusion. Hope this helps. Martin Hellman