A general war is the likeliest scenario for a nuclear attack for the reasons I’ve already posted. So if you detect one nuclear missile heading your way, the likely scenarios are:
There’s a malfunction in your detection equipment or procedures.
You’re seeing the first missile of a general attack.
3a) The Soviets had an “oops”. They were preparing to launch a general attack and one missile got fired early by mistake. They’re going to fire the rest as soon as possible.
3b) The Soviets had an “oops”. They didn’t mean to launch an attack but fired a missile by mistake. Now they figure it’s going to be a war so they’re going to fire the rest as soon as possible.
3c) The Soviets had an “oops”. They didn’t mean to launch an attack but fired a missile by mistake. But they figure you’ll be reasonable about one city getting blown up so they’re not going to do anything more.
In the majority of the scenarios you’ve listed, launch-on-warning would make the situation worse. And in all of them you have some time.
(I think it’s implausible that missiles are going to enter your detection area, clear the detection area, land and destroy their targets (simultaneously) in less time than it takes you to launch).
Then when you try to work out the probabilities of the various events the overall likelihood becomes even more clear: scenario 1 (false alarm) is much more likely than the other four. And scenario 3a (intent to start WWIII + undesired launch) is less likely than the others because it requires two unlikely events.
I think you’re reaching here. You’re trying hard to think of a scenario where “if we don’t strike now it will be too late” and there’s a lot of uncertainty and yet at the same time we’re reasonably sure we’re under attack and who the attacker is.
The difficulty you’re having in trying to contrive such a scenario indicates why launch on warning wouldn’t be a sensible policy.
You’re still missing the point. You’re not trying to launch your missiles before their missiles arrive on target. You’re trying to launch your missiles early enough that they arrive on target before your enemy can launch his missiles. You want to launch thirty minutes before he launches.
Yes, it is just ironic that the name MAD also means insane, and if you spell out the plan, it sounds a bit insane.
People being fundamentally decent didn’t keep WWI and WWII from occurring, or Rowanda, or Kosovo, or Afganistan and the Taliban, or Viet Nam, or Korea, or dozens of other large scale atrocities (just to time window to the Cold War).
As far as preemptive fire, you also have to watch out for soft kills. Suppose you wait to confirm, then start launching just as their missiles arrive? You think EMP from their blasts will leave your retaliatory missiles intact? Nevermind the concussive blast or detonation triggering yours to go off, too.
And you’re missing the point about the likelihood of that scenario.
All or nothing attacks make sense.
OTOH, one or two missiles accidentally launched, which are about to be followed by a full attack, is the least likely of the scenarios discussed in this thread.
There’s no way anyone should work from that explanation.
I also think you may be forgetting the difference in communication abilities between now and the 50s and 60s. No internet, satellite communication, etc–communication is slow, fragile, and not particularly redundant. That first strike lands, and you’re probably not going to be able to launch much of a counter-attack.
Okay, you’re told there’s a lake and it either has no fish or a thousand fish in it. You take a walk along the shore and see one fish in the water. How many fish do you now assume are in the water?
As you point out “all or nothing attacks make sense”. And if you see one missile coming at you, it’s obviously not nothing. So the most sensible alternative is that they’re attacking you with all their missiles even though you’ve only seen one so far.
Now what you’re arguing is that when you looked in the lake you only saw one fish. And if there were a thousand fish in the lake you probably would have seen more than one. And you’re right. You thought it was a fish but maybe it wasn’t - maybe it was a frog. It’s possible you saw a frog that looked like a fish.
So decide. Was it a fish or a frog? Keep in mind if you guess wrong, one hundred million people die. No pressure - you’ve got thirty seconds to decide what you saw and advise the President on whether or not to launch.
There’s a relentless logic at work that you seem to be missing:
There’s no point in launching a single nuclear warhead. It’s all or nothing.
So if you see any evidence of any enemy attack, it’s reasonable to assume that it’s massive.
A massive attack has the potential to severely damage your ability to retaliate.
If your ability to retaliate can be damaged enough, a preemptive attack against you becomes strategically advantageous to your enemy.
If your enemy perceives that a massive attack will be strategically advantageous, they will launch it out of a sense of self-preservation.
So the only way to prevent a preemptive strike is to make it absolutely clear that you will launch a retaliatory strike before your ability to retaliate can be damaged.
Basically, anything less than a paranoid hair-trigger defensive strategy increases the chance of a nuclear attack.
I would have thought my meaning would have been obvious from the context of this thread and what I’ve said earlier, but to clarify:
All or nothing attacks make sense. So if you detect one or two missiles probably it’s not an attack.
Everyone would agree the most likely explanation is a false alarm. Once that’s ruled out, and we’re sure it’s a real object, and it seems to be a nuclear missile, the most likely explanation becomes an accident. Or perhaps a rogue group have seized control of a single launch facility (if such a group had seized some kind of central command facility…again we’d expect all-or-nothing).
And secondly my point is that you may as well wait a while (offensively that is…you should of course do whatever you can to stop the missile immediately) until the situation becomes clearer.
I’m dubious about this idea that in a full attack, you could launch your nukes, have them travel across the world and destroy enemy facilities in less time than it takes them just to launch their missiles. Considering it would be an attack that they were initiating, therefore they had as much setup time as they wanted.
Good, you’ve clearly been following the thread.
And as I’ve said, when you see those additional missiles, you can make the decision to retaliate. It doesn’t gain you anything to launch now, while there’s lots of uncertainty.
You guys with the game-theoretic answers are missing the real-life impliciations.
If you see a just handful of missiles headed toward no particulary important target, it could be:
1: A false alarm, in which case you screw the situation irredeemably by launching, or
2: The actual vanguard of a massive ICBM attack, in which case, let’s face it, you’re already irredeemably screwed. Even if you do launch, your ICBM’s aren’t going to take out the ones already in flight.
So things are pretty bad either way, but one of the avenues offers you a chance at achieving a good outcome. And this is exactly why Stanislav Petrov in 1983 saw what he thought were five missiles and decided to reconfirm. And there have been other near misses when the right choice was made. Any answer in which we’re all still here has to be considered the superior real-life solution.
Well, I’d say we’re talking apples and oranges. I agree that I want people with Petrov’s critical thinking under pressure to make the same decision he did.
As a national policy, however, it’s less clear that’s a good idea.
Personally, the policy I’d employ is to appear ruthlessly determined to launch on any warning, but apply more selective judgment in the actual event of a warning – but not let other nuclear powers know that I do so.
As long as New York City is considered a fair trade for Moscow, that should work out. Just be careful if the first lady is in NYC or you hear high pitched noise in the phone.
The only issue with appearing ruthlessly determined to annihilate all life in another country is that one requires the weaponry to do so.
Then one is faced with the issue of whether it is better national policy to bristle to the brim with weaponry, or actually contribute to human development. In my opinion if the US spent as much as it did now on amenities for the poor, the citizens of a a country where the government nuked the US would revolt and overthrow the government.
I think another scenario needs to be considered. During the Cuban missile crises, Soviet submarines escorting the cargo ships carrying crated missiles were under orders to retaliate if they were attacked. I believe they each had a single nuclear tipped torpedo and they were allowed to use it to defend themselves without further permission from Moscow.
On October 27, 1962
If the B-59 had sunk the USS Randolph I can’t see how that single mushroom cloud would have been evidence of a massive enemy attack.
I can easily imagine how that would have escalated with a nuclear response from the U.S., but that’s not the point. The point is one nuclear strike is not necessarily the start of a massive nuclear attack. And a paranoid hair-trigger defensive strategy, in this case, would have resulted in nuclear war. Possibly MAD, possibly the annihilation of just one side; Cuba and the USSR.
This scenario, a tactical nuke that’s NOT a missile used at sea, differs significantly from a strategic missile attack on a city. But I think it’s clear that you’re just citing this as an example and theoretically a similar provocation could somehow result in a single missile attack on a city.
Even granting your hypothetical, however – that in such a case a full-scale exchange would have followed – I’m not sure it invalidates the “fierce face” strategy I advocated above (endorse massive retaliation officially but apply more selective judgment behind the scenes). I don’t think anyone assumes the strategy is perfect in all circumstances – the question is, which is most likely to prevent The Bad Thing.
While I am an idealist at heart, taking a cold look at nation-states as superorganisms shows that, historically, their behavior has ranged from almost wholly amoral to utterly ruthless.
The “mutual” part was added by opponents of the theory, and in particularly, Herman Kahn of the Hudson Institute, who also developed of the objections and in his series of now-famous lectures (which were published in his treatise On Thermonuclear War) which coined many of the phrases that were subsequently used in the dialogue for Kubrick’s nuclear deterrence satire, Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. The original theory as espoused by advocates at the RAND Corporation and former Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara (who served during deployment of the Titan, Minuteman, and Polaris ICBM/SLBM systems) referred to the games theory approach of deterrence as assured deterrence.
Assured destruction assumes perfect rationality (and complete information) on the part of the players. Under those conditions it is a stable theory for two players (but unstable for three or more). However, once you allow perturbations from pure reason, i.e. emotion, misinformation, individual action by local agents, et cetera, the theory no longer produces a stable result. This is readily demonstrable in a game theory exercise. Or, as McNamara says in the Errol Morris documentary The Fog of War regarding the Cuban Missile Crisis:
I want to say, and this is very important: at the end we lucked out. It was luck that prevented nuclear war. We came that close to nuclear war at the end. Rational individuals: Kennedy was rational; Khrushchev was rational; Castro was rational. Rational individuals came that close to total destruction of their societies. And that danger exists today.
Morris distills this as his Lesson #2: “Rationality will not save us.”
This is a specious and untenable conclusion. If nothing else, the possession of nuclear weapons allowed the essentially criminal Stalinist-Leninist regime to retain power in the Soviet Union for over four decades after WWII in which tens of millions of Soviet and East Bloc citizens were persecuted, impressioned, and killed. As far as the alleged prevention of use, I know of at least a dozen incidents in which alert levels were raised to one step below arming nuclear arsenals in preparation for launch, including the Cuban crisis, the Petrov incident, and so forth. And in fact, post-Soviet Union we’ve become informed of additional incidents and systems which remove rationality and choice from the launch chain; in partiucular, the *
You are generous to give me the benefit of the doubt. For some reason it didn’t register in my mind that I was talking about a tactical nuclear strike against a military target and you were talking about a strategic nuclear strike against a city. Apologies all around.
Well…might have followed, but I won’t derail your train of thought.
I take your point and I agree. I don’t think a strategy can be devised that is perfect in all circumstances. And your question is, of course, a good question that naturally follows from your point AND to which I don’t have anything remotely resembling a definitive answer.