How Risky is a Nuclear Doomsday Machine?

[bananas]

http://nuclearrisk.wordpress.com/2011/03/28/how-risky-is-a-nuclear-doomsday-machine/

How Risky is a Nuclear Doomsday Machine?
Posted on March 28, 2011 by Nuclear Risk

How risky is it to build a nuclear arsenal that has the ability to destroy civilization? That is the fundamental question raised in my paper “How risky is nuclear optimism?” in the current issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. While nuclear deterrence is not usually referred to as a Doomsday Machine, its other name, Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD), brings out its similarity to the Doomsday Machine in Stanley Kubrik’s 1964 movie Dr. Strangelove. As seen in the following excerpt from the script, the Soviets are portrayed as having created such a device to make their nuclear deterrent totally credible:

Alexiy DeSadeski (the Soviet Ambassador): If you take, say, fifty H-bombs in the hundred megaton range and jacket them with cobalt thorium G, when they are exploded they will produce a doomsday shroud. A lethal cloud of radioactivity which will encircle the earth for ninety three years! …

<snip>

Muffley: But surely you can disarm it somehow.

DeSadeski: No. It is designed to explode if any attempt is ever made to untrigger it. …

<snip>

Muffley: But, how is it possible for this thing to be triggered automatically, and at the same time impossible to untrigger?

Strangelove: Mr. President, it is not only possible, it is essential. That is the whole idea of this machine, you know. Deterrence is the art of producing in the mind of the enemy… the fear to attack. And so, because of the automated and irrevocable decision making process which rules out human meddling, the doomsday machine is terrifying. It’s simple to understand. And completely credible, and convincing. …

<snip>

A book review of “Nuclear Deterrence Theory: The Search for Credibility” summarizes the dilemma of nuclear deterrence in more academic terms, but suggests strategies close to that of the Doomsday Machine (emphasis added):

<snip>

While Kubrick’s Doomsday Machine was a literary invention, it turns out that fact followed fiction more closely than we’d have liked. Nuclear strategy expert and former Minuteman Launch Control Officer Dr. Bruce Blair determined that the Soviets had implemented a similar system known as the “dead hand” because it allowed the Soviet leadership to reach from the grave and retaliate should America launch a sneak attack that “decapitated” the Soviet nuclear deterrent. Speaking of Dr. Blair, a 1993 New York Times article reported:

Russia has a computerized system that can automatically fire its nuclear arsenal in wartime if military commanders are dead or unable to direct the battle, a leading American expert on the Russian military says.

Isn’t it time to Defuse the Nuclear Threat by dismantling our Doomsday Machine?

Martin Hellman

FOR FURTHER INFORMATION

<snip>

[Cirque du So-What]

1. Assuming that such a device could be built

it would be the *ultimate* risk. Actually, 'risk' is too vague a term; 'certainty' is more like it. Adhering to the maxim that every weapon ever developed has been used, it stands to reason that *some idiot* would attempt to trigger the doomsday device for whatever psychotic reason.

[Ian David]

3. My idea is The Shortcut Device.

You could save money on missiles and bombers by just detonating your entire nuclear arsenal on your own soil.

Just place them in cities, forests and dumps and blow-up your own country, assured that the ensuing nuclear fallout and nuclear winter will destroy everyone else on the planet with you.

No need for delivery devices.

[Ian David]

2. The only problem is that Dead Hand wasn't designed as a doomsday machine.

It was designed to allow leadership the luxury to slow-down any decision to launch, reassured by the knowledge that if they take too long, Dead Hand will still retaliate after they are dead.