> You are misunderstanding me bringing up mutually assured destruction. Sure, it prevents preemptive strikes, but it doesn't prevent accidental launches, broken early warning systems and bad communication.
No I understand just fine. We are just using different definitions of problem.
In my definition of problem, mutually assured destruction is a solution to the problem of nuclear strikes. Accidental launches, broken early warning systems, and miscommunication are all additional problems, which have their own solutions. There also exist alternative, better solutions to the initial problem (again nuclear strikes), which might avoid some of these additional problems.
> Do you think the fact that we haven't done any of these other measures to a degree that the danger is no longer substantial in 70 or so years is a matter of technology or priority?
Clearly technology. Nuclear war is an existential threat that has occupied the minds of policy makers and the public alike for decades, and there is arguably no higher priority than preventing it. If someone just had a silver bullet lying around that would eliminate that threat and allow the world to sleep easy it would have been implemented immediately, regardless of cost. It's not like our current solution is free, maintaining a nuclear deterrent is massively expensive and of course carries catastrophic risk if it fails. Substantial effort has been placed into developing some of these alternative solutions, but to date mutually assured destruction remains the best solution available. But technological advance continues, and the idea that a better solution could not eventually be found is silly.
> If it's a tech advancement problem, how do not constantly have a rolling window of uncontrolled potentially civilization-ending technology?
That is very clearly a different problem - preventing existential threats from being developed in the future versus dealing with existential threats already developed. Let's rephrase the question as "how do we create a situation where people aren't willing to go through the effort to create more capable weapons of mass destruction?" Again, I don't have answers to all the worlds problems, but it's reasonable to believe that a series of technical fixes to the root causes of the problem exist.