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ChristianKl comments on What did governments get right? Gotta list them all! - Less Wrong Discussion

6 Post author: Stuart_Armstrong 18 September 2013 12:59PM

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Comment author: ChristianKl 19 September 2013 09:59:48PM 0 points [-]

Possibly government spy agencies- almost everything is non-public, but they're known to have had some notable non-classified successes (e.g. RSA)
[...]
The US Navy has a perfect record of safety on its nuclear reactors (the USSR had 14 known accidents on a smaller fleet; there were also numerous civilian meltdowns)

First you acknowledge that there classification and then you say that the lack of public knowledge about US Navy reactor safety issues means that there weren't any?

Comment author: Randaly 20 September 2013 03:01:12AM 2 points [-]
  • NSA stuff is classified because its release would alert others to the US's capabilities; the fact of an accident would not
  • One would expect the USSR to be equally eager to classify their mistakes, and to have greater success; they are believed to have failed utterly
  • Any argument in favor of classifying nuclear accidents would apply equally to the Thresher, Scorpion, Guitarro, San Francisco, and Miami, for which no serious attempt was made at classification
  • Nuclear accidents, judging by the USSR's experience, almost always involve the loss of an entire ship, and many fatalities. It is not possibly for the Navy to just "lose" a ship or a dozen sailors. (No submarine certified under the navy's safety plan, SUBSAFE, has ever been lost, for any reason.) It is even less possible for them to evacuate an aircraft carrier and then rely on tugs to move it to a dock for repair..
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