verbify
6
2
verbify has not written any posts yet.
verbify has not written any posts yet.
There is empirical evidence against the MAD hypothesis.
During the Cuban Missile Crisis, a Russian submarine believed that nuclear war had broken out. Three officers on board the submarine were authorised to unanimously launch a nuclear torpedo. An argument broke out among the three, in which http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasili_Arkhipov was against the launch, preventing a nuclear missile from being launched (and presumably a nuclear retaliation would not be unlikely).
Let's assign a probability that one of the officers would be in favour of launching a missile. Given that 2/3 in our sample were in favour of launching the missile, let's assign the probability to be 2/3 for any single officer. Therefore, the chance that a... (read more)
I meant it didn't eliminate all circumstances.
I think you've pointed out a flaw in my argument. The statement "MAD made nuclear war impossible" is demonstrably false - nuclear war could still happen with MAD. The statement "MAD prevented nuclear war" could still be true - nuclear war may have taken place (and probably would have been more likely) in the absence of MAD, and therefore MAD did prevent a nuclear war.