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Stanislav Petrov, a Soviet officer who averted nuclear war, has died

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Re: Stanislav Petrov, a Soviet officer who averted nuclear war, has died

#91

Post by 0xbear »

dwringer wrote: post #90
0xbear wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course it’s a “hypothesis”. No one wants to drink polonium tea after confirming it.

The whole point of a doomsday device is lost if you keep it a secret! But, a little bit of polonium in your tea is nothing compared to the international conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.

Not really. It’s like Israel’s nuclear arsenal. Not confirming its existence allows Israel to stay out of the various treaties, but is there any doubt that they have it?

Re: Stanislav Petrov, a Soviet officer who averted nuclear war, has died

#92

Post by [deleted] »

0xbear wrote: post #91
dwringer wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole point of a doomsday device is lost if you keep it a secret! But, a little bit of polonium in your tea is nothing compared to the international conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.

Not really. It’s like Israel’s nuclear arsenal. Not confirming its existence allows Israel to stay out of the various treaties, but is there any doubt that they have it?

[deleted]

Re: Stanislav Petrov, a Soviet officer who averted nuclear war, has died

#93

Post by [deleted] »

0xbear wrote: post #91
dwringer wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole point of a doomsday device is lost if you keep it a secret! But, a little bit of polonium in your tea is nothing compared to the international conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.

Not really. It’s like Israel’s nuclear arsenal. Not confirming its existence allows Israel to stay out of the various treaties, but is there any doubt that they have it?

[deleted]

Re: Stanislav Petrov, a Soviet officer who averted nuclear war, has died

#94

Post by [deleted] »

0xbear wrote: post #91
dwringer wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole point of a doomsday device is lost if you keep it a secret! But, a little bit of polonium in your tea is nothing compared to the international conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.

Not really. It’s like Israel’s nuclear arsenal. Not confirming its existence allows Israel to stay out of the various treaties, but is there any doubt that they have it?

[deleted]

Re: Stanislav Petrov, a Soviet officer who averted nuclear war, has died

#95

Post by dTal »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #27
canoebuilder wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wish it were possible to make a service that lets you upload encrypted notes that will be made public after your death. But those two requirements conflict. That's a very interesting idea. What do you mean by the "requirements conflict"? Couldn't it be implemented with a dead man's switch where one would check in every year or so. Of course there would need to be some verification methods baked in to thwart prank…

If the notes are encrypted, you hold the keys. If the service held the keys, no one would use it. But that means the notes can't be decrypted upon your death, since the keys would need to be uploaded at that point.

Simple solution: subcutaneous key implant. Someone has to physically cut you open to decrypt your notes.

Hopefully your attackers are not too determined... but then again, any system where your death results in decryption has that particular flaw. A bigger problem is if you die in such a way that your body can't be recovered.

Re: Stanislav Petrov, a Soviet officer who averted nuclear war, has died

#96

Post by TremendousJudge »

tqkxzugoaupvwqr wrote: post #65
Lxr wrote: post #26

Petrov's story is a really good example of why employing smart people and trusting them beats procedures and metrics every time. May he rest in peace.

You can’t take this case and generalize. In fact, the US’ strategy was a first strike with a handful of nukes and a second, huge wave after the first strike took out main communication/decision centers. So if this had been a real strike, having this intelligent person disregard protocol could have ended in a disaster for the Soviet Union. …On the other hand, a not-so-intelligent person that blindly followed protocol…

>On the other hand, a not-so-intelligent person that blindly followed protocol would have caused the downfall of the US and Soviet Union

I was reading on the Cuban missile crisis last night. There not one but several instances where the Americans said 'if x happens, we nuke the soviets', and then when x happened they didn't (for example, the downed U2 incident). The Soviets probably had just as many of those incidents. I think it really shows that deep down nobody was actually ready to go to war, so in all the chances they had to launch they chose instead not to.

Re: Stanislav Petrov, a Soviet officer who averted nuclear war, has died

#98

Post by Gargoyle »

MichaelMoser123 wrote: post #38
4WIW wrote: post #25

It may be that our biggest collective luck was that the alarm happened at the time subcolonel Petrov was on duty. He was an analyst, maybe even chief analyst of the unit, he authored the playbook for the officers on duty; being on duty wasn't his main job (source: https://cont.ws/@adviser095/717098 ), he would go on duty from time to time. Due to his knowledge of the early warning system he was more likely to cast do…

I wonder if there are other, still classified instances where the weapon has almost been launched. If lt. colonel Petrov was aware of the limitations of the early warning system then there must have been other faults as well - I bet there have been problems with the early warning system on both sides...

I recently read the non-fiction book Command And Control by Eric Schlosser. It's structured around an incident when a Titan II missile blew up in its silo in Arkansas, throwing the warhead out of the silo and into the air.

Anyway, it uses that incident to go back in history and explain the development of nuclear weapons and how the command and control systems we have today came about. A lot of it was driven to prevent all sorts of near-miss accidents that have happened in the past. We've been really, really lucky.

Highly recommend the book, especially for the HN crowd. It's good prose, but gets deep enough into the tech and system details that you come away with a solid understanding of how it all works.

Re: Stanislav Petrov, a Soviet officer who averted nuclear war, has died

#99

Post by maxxxxx »

gambiting wrote: post #69
wutbrodo wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've misunderstood the story. Petrov didn't defy high-level Soviet goals in the name of humanitarianism: the goal was to fire back if fired upon and _not_ to fire back if not fired upon. Petrov's achievement was making the right judgment call that the US had not actually fired on Russia (i.e. that it was a detection anomaly or something). Given that he wasn't deviating from the high-level goals handed down, I don't…

Correct, it's actually likely that a good AI would also conclude, just like Petrov did, that this is not an attack, given everything that was expected from a real attack at the time. If they simply wired a launch detector to the button that launches nukes, then that's not AI.

I look forward to the debugging cycle of such an AI. After a few failures it will work perfectly:)
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