What is a thread on nuclear weapon policy without a few Dr. Strangelove quotes?
[QUOTE=Oregon sunshine]
I just can’t help but offer my opinion, that anyone who is “super sane”, or any kind of sane, would NOT be pushing the button on a weapon of mass destruction. The perverse (but accepted) logic in the framing of this particular issue makes me so sad and scared for our society as a whole. OK back to the factual stuff. Sorry.
[/QUOTE]
Muffley: I’m afraid I don’t understand something, Alexiy. Is the Premier threatening to explode this if our planes carry out their attack?
DeSadeski: No sir. It is not a thing a sane man would do. The doomsday machine is designed to to trigger itself automatically.
[QUOTE=GomiBoy]
As to the question of the OP, yes we were screened for religious views as part of psychological testing for what was called the Nuclear Surety Program. We were also analysed for our basic phsychological fitness and our financial responsibility, as well as other things -they were looking for instability or an avenue for enemy agents or blackmailers to get to us.
[/quote]
General “Buck” Turgidson: Ahem… The Duty Officer asked General Ripper to confirm the fact that he had issued the go code, and he said, uh, “Yes gentlemen, they are on their way in, and no one can bring them back. For the sake of our country, and our way of life, I suggest you get the rest of SAC in after them. Otherwise, we will be totally destroyed by Red retaliation. Uh, my boys will give you the best kind of start, 1400 megatons worth, and you sure as hell won’t stop them now, uhuh. Uh, so let’s get going, there’s no other choice. God willing, we will prevail, in peace and freedom from fear, and in true health, through the purity and essence of our natural… fluids. God bless you all” and he hung up.
[beat]
General “Buck” Turgidson: Uh, we’re, still trying to figure out the meaning of that last phrase, sir.
President Merkin Muffley: There’s nothing to figure out, General Turgidson. This man is obviously a psychotic.
General “Buck” Turgidson: We-he-ell, uh, I’d like to hold off judgement on a thing like that, sir, until all the facts are in.
President Merkin Muffley: General Turgidson! When you instituted the human reliability tests, you assured me there was no possibility of such a thing ever occurring!
General “Buck” Turgidson: Well, I, uh, don’t think it’s quite fair to condemn a whole program because of a single slip-up, sir.
Nothing about nuclear war policy really makes sense in any conventional way of thinking. As the titular character of Kubrick’s masterful satire notes: “Deterrence is the art of producing in the mind of the enemy the fear to attack.” This isn’t just humor on the part of screenwriter Terry Southern; Kubrick actually pulled a lot of the more absurd concepts from Herman Kahn’s treatise On Thermonuclear War, almost to the point of direct quotes. (The “Doomsday Device” was a game theory thought experiment introduced by Kahn, which he used to highlight the problem with a strictly nuclear deterrent.) The fear on both sides of suffering from a lack of weapons, or an attack that might wipe out retaliatory capability, led to the development of arsenals far too large for any real need, and the lack of proportionality in the use of such weapons, even in a tactical sense, would almost certainly lead to wider and eventually strategic use against non-military targets in “total war” fashion. As Robert McNamara puts it in The Fog of War: “They’ll be no learning period with nuclear weapons. Make one mistake and you’re going to destroy nations.”
Regarding Bricker’s question about launch simulations and testing the will of troops to follow launch orders, I’m morally certain that nothing like the events portrayed in WarGames ever occured, at least not deliberately. When engaging in combat or strategic warfare simulations great pains are taken to clearly identify that the equipment used is a simulator. It is assumed that, in the case of an actual attack, officers will do their duty as instructed, and this is a credible assumption. For this reason, there is a very clear and robust system of procedures and communications involved in the transmission of launch orders. If an incomplete or incoherently garbled set of instructions is received, it simply isn’t acted on. (So much for Crimson Tide.) This isn’t to say that some accident can’t occur–famously, in November 1979 a technician accidentially loaded a training tape into the display system which made it appear that a full-scale nuclear attack was occuring, and Soviet fears over the NATO exercise Able Archer 83 caused Soviet systems to be placed on high alert–but it is not done intentionally as a test.
Regarding the o.p.'s question I think GomiBoy has provided the definitive word on the subject: a combination of pschological screening; critical handling and activation operations requiring a multiple person crew; and weapon designs, safety interlocks, and modern Permissable Action Links that prevent unintended or unauthorized activation. Of course, it is also now well known that the original 8-digit combination PALs on the Minuteman system were originally all set to the same combination–00000000–by a general more afraid of launch officers not being able to activate the systems rather than a cabal of rogue officers or airmen performing an unauthorized launch. Ultimately, the safety of nuclear weapons depends on people doing their jobs right, and when enough things fail in order–as happened with the mislocated ‘special’ armed cruise missiles–then any safety system can be subverted. This usually happens (at least in my experience with other types of operations) when someone is trying to cut corners because of a lack of budget or trained crew, and I suspect it was the case here (and a serious concern with regard to Russian and newly emergent nuclear powers).
Stranger
