Slashdot Mirror
Soaring, Cryptography, and Nuclear Weapons
Martin Hellman sends in a pointer to his essay that uses analogies from cryptography and the sport of soaring in an attempt to draw people in to thinking about the risks of nuclear weapons. Quoting: "... I did a preliminary risk analysis which indicates that relying on nuclear weapons for our security is thousands of times more dangerous than having a nuclear power plant built next to your home." Hellman is best known as co-inventor (with Diffie and Merkle) of public key cryptography, and has worked for over twenty-five years to reduce the threat posed by nuclear weapons. He is also a glider pilot with over 2,600 logged hours. Hellman adds, "Readers needing a break can go to some photos of the Sierra Nevada mountains taken from my glider."
...who's takeaway from the article is that we need to build more nuclear plants?
Must have been a stack overflow somewhere. /BOFH reference
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
The thing is, if you all don't have nuclear weapons, and I covertly do, I win.
This is my sig.
If the dangers from owning your own nukes are so serious, why haven't we destroyed the world yet - even with some of the so-called religious fundamentalist whackos that people are so afraid of in the White House?
Honestly, all this fear running around and western democracies - and the Russians - are the ONLY ones who have managed them responsibly. We haven't blown the world up, and the worst are some "near misses" which didn't produce anything. Shoot, we're farther away now from nuclear war between major powers than we have been since before the Cold War.
Point fingers at Iran, Pakistan, North Korea, and their ilk. Leave the rest of us out of it. They're the nuclear "powers" to be afraid of, and we should raise defenses against their armament which are overwhelming - not detente.
The US is nuclear-armed. The Mexican army has, on several occasions, gone into the US and threatened border patrol agents, helped drug runners, and other stuff. Certainly nothing large scale, that is true.
The invasion of the US by illegal aliens from Mexico is a very large scale, and could form a fifth column
MAD doesn't work too well if the enemy is mixed with your own civilians.
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Jordan_Gatling
In 1877, he wrote: "It occurred to me that if I could invent a machine - a gun - which could by its rapidity of fire, enable one man to do as much battle duty as a hundred, that it would, to a large extent supersede the necessity of large armies, and consequently, exposure to battle and disease [would] be greatly diminished."
Sounds a lot like this, from TFA:
Since World War III would mean the end of civilization, no one would dare start it.
The thing is, just as many bodies lie in the dirt since the invention of the machine gun, and armies are effectively as big as ever. Also, this invention has been used to commit COUNTLESS atrocities that wouldn't have been as possible before it was introduced.
My point is simple, focusing on the WEAPON is futile. In the hands of men anything will eventually be turned to evil. You have to assume the worst case when dealing with weapons and humanity. This is also why you basically HAVE to participate in the arms race. The opposite choice is elimination.
pro-israel or anti-israel
pro-usa or anti-usa
you should be against iranian proliferation
there's this weird alien line of thought out there that goes like this: "if the usa has nukes, why shouldn't iran?"
what that thought represents is tribal nationalistic thinking trumping common sense
common sense holds that NO ONE should have nukes. so proliferation is bad, for whomever. the most logical approach to iranian proliferation then is this: "i am against iran having nukes, AND i am against the usa having nukes"
but this whole "i support iran having nukes, to balance out the usa" is a level of stupidity beneath respect
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Strange risk analysis.
Out of untold tens (hundreds?) of thousands of nuclear weapons, only 2 have ever been used on people, and that was at war time. Zero have gone off accidentaly.
Out of the dozens (hundreds?) of nuclear power plants that have been build & torn down, there have been 1 major (Chernobyl) and 1 minor (Three Mile Island) accidents.
That's a pretty small sample size to be dividing against a zero.
I too wanna see how he produced that "risk analysis".
The whole point of nuclear weapons is to overtly have them; if your possession of them is truly "covert," you don't win a damn thing. Even Israel's nuclear program was an open secret for years because it allowed them to gain the effects of deterrence without openly proclaiming that they had a nuclear arsenal. But nobody seriously believed they didn't have one.
I think, perhaps, the person you quoted meant invasions by the military forces of actual countries.
It'd be more of an infiltration of the US by illegal aliens than an invasion. Invasions are rather obvious and hostile affairs.
Non-state actors aren't the target of MAD policies. They generally don't care what sort of destruction they face. A state, on the other hand, has to worry about the continuance of the state.
Psycho with a nuke: not deterred by MAD.
Rogue state with a nuke: leaders still probably not deterred by MAD.
Developed stable state with a nuclear arsenal: welcome to club MAD.
Plus I'm quite sure most (by surface area) of the US would be quite willing (and eager) to sink both coasts into the ocean to quell a fifth column threat.
the principle of MAD (mutually assured destruction) worked in the cold war between the usa and the ussr because russian leaders did not want to see dead russian children and american leaders did not want to see dead american children
meanwhile, iran is a theocracy
the deeply religious believe the afterlife is a glorious reward for the righteous, an eden. in its war with iraq, iran sent children with little wooden keys around their necks to clean up minefields. the keys were the keys to heaven. how is a death a deterent for those who see death as a reward? how do you deter iranian leaders when they think dead iranian children are in a better place?
a theocracy with a bomb should give everyone a special pause
iran with the bomb is different and unique when considering any other country that currently has the bomb
iran really should not get the bomb. no theocracy should
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it