One thing I’d love to learn more about is the risk that nuclear weapons just don’t work. As far as I know modern nuclear weapons have never been subject to an end-to-end test. Russia hasn’t tested a warhead for over 40 years, let alone warhead + delivery mechanism. The UK tests the Trident missiles (not warheads) once a decade and it has failed the last two tests. And in general my impression is the failure rate for untested software is very high. So it seems pretty plausible to me—albeit a quite poorly informed person—that a country might launch a nuclear weapon in anger and it just fails to detonate at the target.
Thanks very much for sharing!
One thing I’d love to learn more about is the risk that nuclear weapons just don’t work. As far as I know modern nuclear weapons have never been subject to an end-to-end test. Russia hasn’t tested a warhead for over 40 years, let alone warhead + delivery mechanism. The UK tests the Trident missiles (not warheads) once a decade and it has failed the last two tests. And in general my impression is the failure rate for untested software is very high. So it seems pretty plausible to me—albeit a quite poorly informed person—that a country might launch a nuclear weapon in anger and it just fails to detonate at the target.