Did the Soviets build a doomsday machine that's still operational?

Blair is not a wild-eyed Cassandra raising unsupported suspicions. Colleagues in his field regard him as a serious and cautious scholar raising real questions. Stephen M. Meyer, an expert ohttp://www.slate.com/id/2173108n the Russian military at MIT, told the Times that Blair "requires of himself a much higher standard of evidence than many people in the intelligence community."

Blair's troubling papers, along with his book The Logic of Accidental Nuclear War, serve as a reminder that the illogic, irrationalities, and vulnerability to catastrophic error of our Cold War nuclear war command and control mechanisms were never resolved or fixed, just forgotten when the Cold War ended. His analysis suggests that during the Cold War, we may have escaped an accidental nuclear war by luck rather than policy.

Sleep tight...

[Update on Thursday morning]

Alan K. Henderson is having a flashback. Errrr...make that flashforward.

So, when is Putin's birthday?

Where's Slim Pickens when you need him?

Reading closely, what they seem to be saying is that if anyone other than the president can launch a missile it constitutes a doomsday weapon. I think that is a bit broad - first of all, there is always a human in the loop. Secondly, they are not talking about a "destroy the biosphere" response, they are talking about a "launch our missiles" response. While the destruction would be massive, it would not end all life on the planet or anything like that.

In other words: no all-powerful computer, no Earth ending kaboom, no doomsday weapon...

"The whole point of a Doomsday device is that you tell people that you have it. Why did you not tell the world you had built it?"

"It was to be announced at the party leaders birthday on tuesday."

No kaboom? There was supposed to be an Earth-shattering kaboom.

My girlfriend has told me my ass should be labeled as a doomsday device.

Isn't the operational life span of an atomic bomb limited to a couple of decades at most?

If they ever had a doomsday device, or set of them, they probably wouldn't be functional any more.

"While the destruction would be massive, it would not end all life on the planet or anything like that."

In some ways, that scares me even more. It makes it an attractive option for some nutcase terrorist who wants to bring back the caliphate.

After all, just one little nuke on Russian soil and I can drag the rest of the world back down to my 14th century level but still leave a population ready, if not entirely willing, to accept the boss.

Another problem here is that Russia isn't the only country that has strategic incentives to use a deadman's device with nukes. China, India, and Pakistan all have similar problems. Namely, that they each have one or more potential enemies who can strike with little warning and take out most of their defenses and retaliation capability. If Iran isn't stopped from acquiring nuclear weapons, then Iran and Israel will join the list (assuming Israel doesn't already have something planned).

FYI, the new Bl0gger has an unresolved bug: it's double-posting the numerical portion of URLs to individual posts.

#3442791476408134237#3442791476408134237

should be

#3442791476408134237