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Comment by CapitalistCartr | Hacker News Reader

I think your premise is sound, but your example is unfortunate. SLBMs are less accurate, but still much better than "horribly inaccurate". And American ICBMs started out with poor accuracy, but are now quite accurate(1), and were by the 1970s. If you're standing in the target building, you are already dead.

(1)I'm being a bit coy here because during Uncle Ronnie's administration, I had a job and security clearance involving this.

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The thing is, well there are lots of things and I do t mean to impune your work some forty years ago but

1. We have learnt not to trust untested equipment

2. We have learnt that under pressure well meaning people will demonstrate equipment that while kind of representative of the reality are honed, improved and generously helped to perform well on test

3. Only repeatable performance under active competition is a real measure. It’s why sane people like open well designed markets. And it’s why weapons that get battle tested tend to be reliable

I am sure that overall if we read the red button nukes will fire and land and kill millions.

It’s just the day after I expect that the auditors will find a large number failed to fire, or failed to leave the tube, went the wrong way or simply otherwise went wrong

The point of credible threat is not one shot one kill, but so many shots we can basically guarantee a kill.

In other other words, both sides hold enormous number of nukes ostensibly to ensure they have some to fire after a first strike - but the effects of an enemy first strike are indistinguishable from poor engineering and beauracracy

Military nuclear programs are completely unlike civilian programs. Rigorous, repeated, varied testing, no expense spared. Our ICBMs are far from untested. We used to fire 2-3 per year to insure their reliability. Pulled out of the field, launched from Vandenberg, and carefully analyzed. I never once had any bureaucracy interfere with doing an excellent job, and money was never a limit. In the event of WW3, at least 96% would have struck their targets. We know that from decades of expensive research, testing, and incremental improvements. We spent over 5 trillion dollars on our nuclear program and received our money's worth.

It’s just … given something like 30k warheads (I know not same as rockets) but taking 2 or 3 for testing (and notably, taking, checking, scrubbing down, repairing … improving?) and then saying that represents the whole fleet, and leaving in the field for years between expensive retrofitting cycles on decade timescales

I mean maybe the USA was a on it’s A game for fifty plus years … us in the UK well …

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-68355395

Worth noting that UK missiles (but not warheads) are taken from a joint pool with the US. They have completely shared maintenance, so any reliability concerns are shared. Similarly, the testing is also joint so this should be seen as two failures out of all trident tests rather than two UK failures.

Not that that is a fun headline of course.

Obviously everything around it is super secret but the muttering around this one seemed to be that the rocket noticed the warhead seemed wrong (which it was because you don't strap a real nuke to it!) And aborted itself. I only add this because I think its interesting.

> the rocket noticed the warhead seemed wrong

Oh, that sounds like plausible muttering, and may be consistent with the utterances of the naval authorities.

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