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Comment by dividedbyzero | Hacker News Reader

If I understand this correctly those planes play a role in coordinating nuclear strikes; is this just normal posturing in case someone might think of launching at the US in the confusion a severe progression of Trump's illness would cause? Is this something to be worried about?

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I was in Singapore the day that Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. All of Singapore was on high alert and soldiers were everywhere even though it’s half a world away. It’s basically a basic level of readiness when something out of the ordinary happens. It shows the world that even if you tried to sneak attack the US with nukes that the US was capable of retaliating. The entire point of Mutually Assured Destruction requires the ability to strike back as part of the defense otherwise attacking first becomes a better solution.

MAD as a concept faded out in the early 1980s. Improved accuracy led to the policy of counterforce ( against enemy military assets ) instead of countervalue ( cities and social structure ).

MAD was a necessary compromise when delivery accuracy and certainty were insufficient to target individual threat sites. It led to enormous megatonne weapons. Whereas modern counterforce involves small-yield warheads placed accurately.

I was going to say that can't be correct, otherwise some civic-minded third party could swat a global thermonuclear war, saving us all. But https://fas.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/WarheadInventorie... agrees, even if it is by warheads and not by megatonnage. So if I'm in a third world country with no foreign bases that has emergency plans for autarky, I'd not be likely to come off too poorly were everything to go elliptical?

Bonus clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecPeSmF_ikc

Edit: https://ourworldindata.org/nuclear-weapons (which also shows that both the hexagonal "Force de dissuasion" and Airforce One's Tridents are in the noise)

> "These weapons have the capacity to kill millions directly and through their impact on agriculture have likely the potential to kill billions."

Maybe swatting RU/US wouldn't be so civic minded after all.

It's a backup command center, in case of a decapitation strike. You could make a case for being more nervous, since a higher state of alert could either provoke more mistakes, or cause ambiguous moves to be interpreted as hostile ones.

Or, from a perspective of posterior probability, you could not be worried at all, since nuclear war has never before happened.

"Domestic animals expect food when they see the person who usually feeds them. We know that all these rather crude expectations of uniformity are liable to be misleading. The man who has fed the chicken every day throughout its life at last wrings its neck instead, showing that more refined views as to the uniformity of nature would have been useful to the chicken."

I understand communications from boomers' spouses are sent by radio in the clear (from platforms such as an E-6B?), so everyone gets to appreciate the rare occasions when double entendres are slipped in past the censors.

Yes, and what so? I think this is a standard protocol for almost all countries to activate reserve command centres in case of military leadership being incapacitated/dead/or in risk of captivity.

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