Many other people would not have been so thoughtful as to question what their technology is telling them. Richard Mallah: I'd say the Petrov incident since he recalls his decision to override official processes as 50/50. But this is partly relying on my guess that in many other close-calls, the event wouldn't have escalated to full MAD if I'm wrong about this, then the Arkhipov incident seems scariest, since the 2 officers out of 3 agreeing to use their weapon clearly show that the disaster was close to happening. Janos Kramar: I think perhaps the Yeltsin incident is scariest, simply because a nuclear football was involved and the missile itself had a plausible flight path for an opening EMP attack. These examples show how much can depend on the decisions of a single person. Victoria Krakovna: For me it would be a tie between the Arkhipov and Petrov incidents, and Presidential Depression is pretty scary as well. As mental health becomes a more recognized issue, it's increasingly apparent that no one can really be trusted with nuclear weapons. It's not dependent on external conflicts with other countries, but internal, personal conflicts that the rest of the world may or may not know about. We humans are so hubristic when comparing ourselves to the rest of the animal kingdom, yet we’ve inadvertently created a system through which a single bear could endanger our civilization.Īriel Conn: Richard Nixon's depression is the scariest to me because that's something that could happen at any time to any president. Meia Chita-Tegmark: I find the incident of the bear triggering a nuclear alarm from Octovery cynical. will conspire to create big problems (like “Soviet Sub Captain…Crisis”) and (b) we were *very* lucky to get through the Cuban Missile crisis, and we have no good reason to be confident that we would make it through any similar flare-up in tensions. They are either paraphrased or directly quoted, and each links to the original source.įLI members on the close calls they think were scariestĪnthony Aguirre: Perhaps it’s breaking the rules, but I would say the constellation of incidents *around* (and including) the Cuban missile crisis - so many! It suggests that (a) when tensions escalate, it becomes dramatically more probable that unfortunate coincidences etc. Most of the reports in the timeline above come from the Union of Concerned Scientists, the Nuclear Files, Eric Schlosser’s book, Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Incident, and the Illusion of Safety, or Mother Jones. The risk of accidental nuclear war is only growing, and barring major initiatives for risk reduction, it’s merely a matter of time before our luck runs out. and Russia are both upgrading their arsenals, which means new weapons and new ways for something in the system to go wrong. Many nuclear experts are concerned about a war between India and Pakistan, and if one of them were to accidentally start a nuclear war, the resulting nuclear winter could kill 1 billion people worldwide. that we don't know about, and we certainly don't know about close calls the other eight nuclear countries have had. Many other events may have occurred in the U.S. The list of close calls above is too long for comfort, yet it's likely very incomplete, given that these represent only America's declassified events.
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