Comment by smegger001 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by smegger001 | Hacker News Reader

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The problem from game theoretical prospective is if you disarm and the other side doesn't your screwed. If the other side disarms it and you don't you win. Neither of you disarm and you maintain the status quo. And as you cant compel the other side to disarm there is no way to get to the mutual disarmament mutual win condition. Disarmament is just a prisoner's dilemma with WMD's and thanks to John Nash we all know mathematically the best move is to defect.

MAD works best also when you act as militaristic and insane as possible so the other side is afraid to do anything lest you kick the nuclear football. Hopefully everyone with access to the nukes knows this, but you cant admit you know this lest the enemy spies find out its a bluff thus weakening the bluff so both sides have to keep up the keefab at all time even internally. so while both sides may act like paranoid crackhead with a gun on the edge of starting Nuclear Armageddon for looking at them funny. They know its a suicide to actually fallow through. And it works. Why do you think the whole world puts up with the ongoing shit show in North Korea? They have nukes and can hit Tokyo Seoul Honolulu and Seattle.

Besides we don't even know that doesn't work. We haven't had a World War or major European war since the end of ww2. If we look back historically going 75 years without a major European war is amazing. all of the big wars since have pretty much been with major powers with non industrialized nations or collapsed failed nation states.

As for elites using nukes on the proles, that is ridicules and violates the don't shit where you eat rule. IE radiation poisoning doesn't care about your net-worth.

The problem with that argument is that at some point acting insane to keep up pretenses and actually being insane becomes indistinguishable and you end up with the situation that only a young Russian nuclear officer disobeying orders is saving the world from nuclear Armageddon [1]

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov

you only want the leadership to act insane not the people sitting in the silos. You want sober rational if possible anti nuclear war individual in the silos but again you cant advertise that or you break the keefab the whole thing rides on.

Well there's a reason there are safeguards agreements and inspections. The idea is a slow mutual drawdown and then eventually a rapid final disarmament once a critical low threshold is reached.

You can maintain the safeguards and inspections indefinitely via the IAEA.

https://www.ctbto.org/verification-regime/

But then it becomes a race to create the technology that can build nuclear weapons the fastest creating a more volatile equilibrium.

That's a good point but I suspect the feasibility of this approach depends on having large facilities and uranium procurement operations. These are things that can be regulated. You can see this in the Iran situation where their "breakout time" is measurable. With nations willing to negotiate, this could be brought under control. However, tbh I think they probably should have a deterrent as they are facing a serious invasion threat by nuclear armed powers. The world needs to scale down in tandem, not weaker parties first and stronger parties later.

not just fast manufacture times but replace many smaller yeild weapons but newer high yield weapons to keep the numbers in the agreed range but not actually reducing your damage potential.

You can make maximum yields part of your agreements. Of note though, the US during the Obama years improved the accuracy of submarine launched missiles which greatly improved the damage potential while staying in the agreed ranges. This was because fewer nukes would be needed per a target so overall damage could be increased.

For an example of this type of thing, see slide 11 (which refers to air dropped munitions rather than SLBMs): https://fas.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Brief2017_Italy2....

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