Ask HN: Do you think nuclear armageddon is plausible?

The main counterargument I see to this happening goes like: any world leader calling for nuclear armageddon will not be obeyed/will be assassinated because they cannot convince the entire chain of command to commit suicide. This seems flaky to me. One other thought I had is that perhaps that we are not capable of nuclear armageddon, because this has not been tested end-to-end, although ICBMs and nukes have been tested quite extensively.

What does HN think? Could it happen? And why do we assume that the tech is sufficiently advanced to e.g. take out every major city at the push of a button?

A useful analogy is individual risk. Consider a doctor giving a new treatment to a sick patient. It has some uncertainty, some risk including death and some potential gain including being healed. But it's possible to reason about the tradeoff and learn to better estimate this over time.

However, to a single patient, while there are both risk and potential benefit, the realized outcome is absolute: Either he lives or he dies. The mental model is very different from the doctors' because both scenarios are extremely charged.

In nuclear war, you are always the patient who either lives completely or dies completely. I guess that makes everyone humble. Or at least, it should.