Sam Harris
👤 SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
And it was really just
JFK who decided no, we're not going to do that.
What do we know about what was happening there?
And so nuclear weapons- This is Vasily Arkhipov?
Well, I want to return to that logic of brinksmanship and just the game theory there, because obviously it's relevant to our current moment as we watch the war in Ukraine unfold and the concern about first use of nuclear weapons has suddenly become more relevant to everyone.
But before we get there, it's worth focusing on this feature of the problem, which is
I mean, it's not talked about enough, which is that there's so many moments where we have come close to nuclear catastrophe.
And the reason why we haven't has come down to a decision of a single person.
You know, in the case of JFK, it's understandable he's the president of the United States.
He's the person who should be deciding this.
I mean, as crazy as that sounds, I'm not sure we've even thought through the logic and psychology and practicality of having even a president make this decision.
But there are multiple cases where you have a low-level commander on the Soviet side who's deciding whether or not to start a nuclear war on the basis of some information that
The other case was in 1983, where you had a, I think it was a lieutenant colonel, Stanislav Petrov, who got some faulty radar data.
He wasn't in a position to decide whether or not to respond with nuclear weapons, but he was in a position to pass this data up the chain, and it seems very likely that a retaliatory response would have been forthcoming.
But if memory serves, he saw that it looked like, based on the radar, that the U.S.
had launched something like five ICBMs as a first strike.
And he reasoned that there's no way they would just launch five missiles.
If it's going to be a first strike, they would launch hundreds.
So this is probably bad data.
But the idea that we have a system where it is falling to some low-level person to decide whether we are on a grease slide into nuclear Armageddon, it's a crazy situation.