Almost everything in Dr. Strangelove was true (2014)
I read an interesting book a while ago by Thomas Schelling [1] that said in nuclear launch systems, being unreliable is a feature not a bug.<p>Let&#x27;s say you want to threaten your enemy with nuclear war so they&#x27;ll do what you want. Maybe you want them to withdraw their missiles from Cuba. The threat you make actually has two components - the claim you&#x27;ll launch, and the credibility of that claim. The enemy is only scared of the &#x2F;product&#x2F; of threat and credibility, so if either is zero your enemy has nothing to fear.<p>If you say &quot;we&#x27;ll certainly launch&quot; you have no credibility (you&#x27;d have launched already, and everyone can see you haven&#x27;t) and if you say &quot;we certainly won&#x27;t launch&quot; you have no threat.<p>In fact, Schelling points out, the only credible threats are &#x2F;randomized&#x2F; threats, that fall somewhere between 100% and 0% chance of launching. You threaten your enemy by showing him you have a system that has a 0.1% chance of launching per day, and you&#x27;ll roll the dice every day until they withdraw their missiles from cuba (or whatever you want them to do).<p>Except rather than rolling dice, the random threat is from systems failures and mad generals.<p>This is what the DEFCON level is really about - increasing the &#x27;readiness level&#x27; amounts to reducing the controls that prevent accidental launches, increasing the threat of a random launch.<p>&#x27;Doomsday machines&#x27; can be explained by a similar calculation: Nobody will believe you if you claim you&#x27;ll trigger nuclear war if a single soldier took a single step over a border. So why would you for two soldiers or two steps - or indeed the capture of some trifling town near one of your allies&#x27; borders? It&#x27;s not like mutually assured destruction will become a more palatable concept when the enemy tanks are ten miles over the border instead of one.<p>However, if you build a doomsday machine with tank detectors ten miles past the border, then you give enemy diplomats and spies a tour and show them that it works, the claim that you&#x27;ll launch has credibility &#x2F;despite&#x2F; the fact the ten mile line is arbitrary. The invader&#x27;s calculation is no longer &quot;If our conventional forces do X, will &#x2F;they&#x2F; trigger a launch?&quot; but instead &quot;Do &#x2F;we&#x2F; want to trigger a launch?&quot; and the answer to that is always &#x27;no&#x27;.<p>So Dr Strangelove is actually a pretty well informed film :)<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Thomas_Schelling#The_Strategy_of_Conflict_.281960.29" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Thomas_Schelling#The_Strategy_...</a>