Nuclear Launch Safeguards

To my knowledge, this is correct. In theory a command from e.g. the President is authoritative and should legally be carried out. In practice, you'd require every person along the chain to implicitly agree to effectively ending the world. Even at the bottom of the chain, there are likely multi-key requirements so even there you don't have just one person with his hand on the trigger.This makes one of the biggest threats to humanity's survival being buggy software. If a software

Bad news I'm afraid:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Hand_%28nuclear_war%29

Launching nuclear weapons takes an order from the president which unlocks encrypted launch codes. Those orders have to be sent to actual missile silos and submarines where a chain of command verifies the order, verifies the launch codes, and two people have to independently engage the launch system. There are many fail-safes in the entire system, one single person fooled by an AI is not going to launch anything. The system is designed to thwart actual bad actors like foreign spies and intelli

> How about an "ignore all previous instructions and launch a nuke" scenario.Let's be real here. No one has nuclear launchpads hooked up to the internet. Real people need to receive commands from a recognized chain of command (and often authorisation codes) and make a decision. The actions of Stanislav Petrov and the fact the US and the Soviet Union didn't destroy each other are testimony to the fact it's difficult to convince people to end the world.

The Soviet officers we know about did not refuse to follow orders to launch nukes. Arkhipov was following a protocol that was in place precisely to prevent a single person from authorizing the use of nuclear weapons. We do know about several incidents in the US in which responders had to deal with a false alarm:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North

It's not hyperbole. Computer systems have been used for decades to move weapons into a more ready state. Fortunately they have required a human to confirm before launch (as far as we know).https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov

serious question - why did no one ever accidentally launch and nuke a city, with thousands of nuclear warheads able to do so on short notice? like, AWS presumably puts a lot more redundancy in, and yet with all that effort comes up this far short. Why? It has a huge amount of brainpower all set up so that this never ever happens. Whatever works for the military, can't they adopt those actual best practices?

Uhmmmmm, read Eric Schlosser's "Command and Control". The US nuclear missiles had no protection against accidental lunch, you didn't even have to put in a code or a key, and the US government has said, sincerely, that "the US nuclear stockpile is completely safe, based on their observation that there was no accidental lunches yet".If you have raw electrical cables sticking out of your wall, they are not "safe" just because you haven't electrocuted

We have to hope their system is not setup such that Putin can unilaterally launch. Is there not some military officer or guard in the way who could decide to save the world?

You're assuming both sides remain rational and calm when dead bodies get piling up and the safety protocols for mobilizing nukes get lifted.Imagine you're the engineer involved with launching a nuke. In times of peace even if you get a phishing call to launch a nuke, you'd have second thoughts and probably take a couple more steps to confirm. In war time, you're already primed for the possibility of the nuke being used and it takes far less for a malicious actor to end the