I think privilege/inequality is a bad frame for thinking about things like nuclear weapons, because it hides the important part, which is the shape of the institutions involved. Asking whether an individual and a state should be more or less unequal is something of a type error, which chains into conflating states with their heads-of-state, which deflects attention away from noticing that all the optimization potential is in the surrounding structure and not the individual.
In general, I think that inequality is mostly a bad abstraction. I mean, it’s an ok way to think about what the numbers in the progressive-income-tax table should be, but usually what happens is people see something which is straightforwardly bad, and wind up talking about who it impacts rather than what it is and how to fix it. Which tends to produce an unfavorable heat-to-light ratio and no fixes.
Asking whether an individual and a state should be more or less unequal is something of a type error, which chains into conflating states with their heads-of-state,
I chose the example of atomic weapons partly because it practically cannot be a state, or even a medium size organization, making the decision. Due to the limitations of the actual technology.
It will practically be limited to a single or small group of individuals making the final decision,
In the case of deciding whether to counterattack it will almost certainly be a single individual, or automated program, making the final decision, regardless of the surrounding organization, due to the immense speed of modern weapons.
Thus I am indeed comparing individuals to individuals and not individuals to states, at least for the actual usage.
In the case of nuclear weapons, they infamously have been made to require two individuals to both press the button (or turn the key) to launch the missile. Even if some situations aren’t currently setup like that, they certainly all could be made to require at least two people.
Submarine launched supersonic missiles already reduce the decision time to just a few minutes for the major capitals.
As they’re all within a few hundred km to international waters, leaving it very unlikely that even a second person could be consulted in that timeframe. The only exception would be if they were coincidentally in the same room.
This is regardless of what laws or systems or organizational structures happen to exist or be developed in the future, assuming the capital stays put. Since the physical distance to the capital cannot be feasibly changed by any human action.
(There is a possibility for an even more extreme scenario to arise, if fractional orbital bombardment ever becomes implemented, which would reduce the decision time to under a minute. In such a case it would not be physically credible for any human to have any authority at all in deciding on a counterattack.)
US military policy requires that for a nuclear weapon to actually be launched, two people at the silo or on the submarine have to coordinate to launch the missile. The decision still comes from a single person (the President), but the people who follow out the order have to be double checked, so that a single crazy serviceman doesn’t launch a missile.
It wouldn’t be crazy for the President to require a second person to help make the decision, since the President is going to be surrounded by aides at all times. For political reasons we don’t require it, but it sounds reasonable as a military policy.
It wouldn’t be crazy for the President to require a second person to help make the decision, since the President is going to be surrounded by aides at all times.
‘Consulting’ with any random aide that happens to be the nearest on duty seems even less desirable then making the decision alone.
If you mean a rotating staff of knowledgeable military attaches or similar, maybe. If they literally stay nearby 24⁄7.
But then wouldn’t it be the military attache making the final decision, since they will always have the more up-to-date knowledge that cannot be fully elaborated in a few minutes?
The policy could just be “at least one person has to agree with the President to launch the nuclear arsenal”. It probably doesn’t change the game that much, but it at least gets rid of the possible risk that the President has a sudden mental break and decides to launch missiles for no reason. Notably it doesn’t hurt the ability to respond to an attack, since in that situation there would undoubtedly be at least one aide willing to agree, presumably almost all of them.
Actually consulting with the aide isn’t necessary, just an extra button press to ensure that something completely crazy doesn’t happen.
Actually consulting with the aide isn’t necessary, just an extra button press to ensure that something completely crazy doesn’t happen.
But the probability of a false alarm can never be reduced to zero.
In this case wouldn’t it be most desirable to have the most knowledgeable person, with the best internal estimate of the probability of a false alarm, to make the final decision?
Leaving it to anyone other than the person with the best estimate seems to be intentionally tolerating a higher than minimal possibility of senseless catastrophe.
A single human is always going to have a risk of a sudden mental break, or perhaps simply not having been trustworthy in the first place. So it seems to me like a system where the most knowledgeable person has the single decision is always going to be somewhat more risky than a situation where that most knowledgeable person also has to double check with literally anyone else. If you make sure that the two people are always together, it doesn’t hurt anything (other than the salary for that person, I suppose, but that’s negligible).
For political reasons, we say that the US President is definitionally that most knowledgeable person, which probably isn’t actually the case, but they are at least the person that the US voting system has said should make the decision.
Which is all to say, even in the most urgent response most critical system, adding a structure that takes sole power away from a single person increases safety. Of course, I don’t think we’ll have a world where that structure involves everyone, but I think that increasing individual inequality is a bad choice.
For another angle with nuclear weapons, if we could somehow teach people so that some people only understood half of building the weapon and other people only understood the other half, it would decrease the odds that a single person would be able to build a nuclear weapon or teach a terrorist organization, even if more people now have some knowledge. Decreasing inequality of nuclear-weapon-knowledge would create a safer society.
There is the problem of the less knowledgeable being deceived by a false alarm or ignoring a genuine alarm.
Since the consequences are so enormous for either case, due to competitive dynamics between multiple countries, it still doesn’t seem desirable, or even credible, to entrust this to anything larger then a small group at best.
In the case of extreme time pressure, such as the hypothetical 5 minute warning, trying to coordinate between a small group of hastily assembled non-experts, under the most extreme duress imaginable, will likely increase the probability of both immensely undesirable scenarios. (Assuming they can even be assembled and communicate quickly enough)
On the other hand, this removes the single point of failure, and leaving it to a single individual does have the other downsides you mentioned.
So there may not be a clear answer, if we assume communication speeds are sufficient, leaving it to a political choice.
For another angle with nuclear weapons, if we could somehow teach people so that some people only understood half of building the weapon and other people only understood the other half, it would decrease the odds that a single person would be able to build a nuclear weapon or teach a terrorist organization, even if more people now have some knowledge. Decreasing inequality of nuclear-weapon-knowledge would create a safer society.
Perhaps this might have been feasible before the invention of the internet.
Nowadays, this seems practically impossible, as anyone competent enough to understand building half a weapon will be very likely capable of extrapolating to the full weapon in short order. Also, more than likely capable of bypassing any blocks society may establish to prevent communication between those with complementary knowledge.
Even if it was split 10 ways, the delay may only be a few years to decades until the knowledge is reassembled.
After thinking over this comment a bit more, I think the latter portions may have a point but the opening sentence is very unfortunate because it misleads to the exact opposite of reality.
Nuclear weapons, in a counterattack at least, are actually the least influenced by ‘the shape of the institutions involved’ of any current weapons, due to the immense time pressure negating nearly all plausible differences in institutional arrangements, societal structure, culture, etc…
I think privilege/inequality is a bad frame for thinking about things like nuclear weapons, because it hides the important part, which is the shape of the institutions involved. Asking whether an individual and a state should be more or less unequal is something of a type error, which chains into conflating states with their heads-of-state, which deflects attention away from noticing that all the optimization potential is in the surrounding structure and not the individual.
In general, I think that inequality is mostly a bad abstraction. I mean, it’s an ok way to think about what the numbers in the progressive-income-tax table should be, but usually what happens is people see something which is straightforwardly bad, and wind up talking about who it impacts rather than what it is and how to fix it. Which tends to produce an unfavorable heat-to-light ratio and no fixes.
I chose the example of atomic weapons partly because it practically cannot be a state, or even a medium size organization, making the decision. Due to the limitations of the actual technology.
It will practically be limited to a single or small group of individuals making the final decision,
In the case of deciding whether to counterattack it will almost certainly be a single individual, or automated program, making the final decision, regardless of the surrounding organization, due to the immense speed of modern weapons.
Thus I am indeed comparing individuals to individuals and not individuals to states, at least for the actual usage.
In the case of nuclear weapons, they infamously have been made to require two individuals to both press the button (or turn the key) to launch the missile. Even if some situations aren’t currently setup like that, they certainly all could be made to require at least two people.
Submarine launched supersonic missiles already reduce the decision time to just a few minutes for the major capitals.
As they’re all within a few hundred km to international waters, leaving it very unlikely that even a second person could be consulted in that timeframe. The only exception would be if they were coincidentally in the same room.
This is regardless of what laws or systems or organizational structures happen to exist or be developed in the future, assuming the capital stays put. Since the physical distance to the capital cannot be feasibly changed by any human action.
(There is a possibility for an even more extreme scenario to arise, if fractional orbital bombardment ever becomes implemented, which would reduce the decision time to under a minute. In such a case it would not be physically credible for any human to have any authority at all in deciding on a counterattack.)
What I’m referring to is the two-man rule: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-man_rule
US military policy requires that for a nuclear weapon to actually be launched, two people at the silo or on the submarine have to coordinate to launch the missile. The decision still comes from a single person (the President), but the people who follow out the order have to be double checked, so that a single crazy serviceman doesn’t launch a missile.
It wouldn’t be crazy for the President to require a second person to help make the decision, since the President is going to be surrounded by aides at all times. For political reasons we don’t require it, but it sounds reasonable as a military policy.
‘Consulting’ with any random aide that happens to be the nearest on duty seems even less desirable then making the decision alone.
If you mean a rotating staff of knowledgeable military attaches or similar, maybe. If they literally stay nearby 24⁄7.
But then wouldn’t it be the military attache making the final decision, since they will always have the more up-to-date knowledge that cannot be fully elaborated in a few minutes?
The policy could just be “at least one person has to agree with the President to launch the nuclear arsenal”. It probably doesn’t change the game that much, but it at least gets rid of the possible risk that the President has a sudden mental break and decides to launch missiles for no reason. Notably it doesn’t hurt the ability to respond to an attack, since in that situation there would undoubtedly be at least one aide willing to agree, presumably almost all of them.
Actually consulting with the aide isn’t necessary, just an extra button press to ensure that something completely crazy doesn’t happen.
But the probability of a false alarm can never be reduced to zero.
In this case wouldn’t it be most desirable to have the most knowledgeable person, with the best internal estimate of the probability of a false alarm, to make the final decision?
Leaving it to anyone other than the person with the best estimate seems to be intentionally tolerating a higher than minimal possibility of senseless catastrophe.
A single human is always going to have a risk of a sudden mental break, or perhaps simply not having been trustworthy in the first place. So it seems to me like a system where the most knowledgeable person has the single decision is always going to be somewhat more risky than a situation where that most knowledgeable person also has to double check with literally anyone else. If you make sure that the two people are always together, it doesn’t hurt anything (other than the salary for that person, I suppose, but that’s negligible).
For political reasons, we say that the US President is definitionally that most knowledgeable person, which probably isn’t actually the case, but they are at least the person that the US voting system has said should make the decision.
Which is all to say, even in the most urgent response most critical system, adding a structure that takes sole power away from a single person increases safety. Of course, I don’t think we’ll have a world where that structure involves everyone, but I think that increasing individual inequality is a bad choice.
For another angle with nuclear weapons, if we could somehow teach people so that some people only understood half of building the weapon and other people only understood the other half, it would decrease the odds that a single person would be able to build a nuclear weapon or teach a terrorist organization, even if more people now have some knowledge. Decreasing inequality of nuclear-weapon-knowledge would create a safer society.
There is the problem of the less knowledgeable being deceived by a false alarm or ignoring a genuine alarm.
Since the consequences are so enormous for either case, due to competitive dynamics between multiple countries, it still doesn’t seem desirable, or even credible, to entrust this to anything larger then a small group at best.
In the case of extreme time pressure, such as the hypothetical 5 minute warning, trying to coordinate between a small group of hastily assembled non-experts, under the most extreme duress imaginable, will likely increase the probability of both immensely undesirable scenarios. (Assuming they can even be assembled and communicate quickly enough)
On the other hand, this removes the single point of failure, and leaving it to a single individual does have the other downsides you mentioned.
So there may not be a clear answer, if we assume communication speeds are sufficient, leaving it to a political choice.
Perhaps this might have been feasible before the invention of the internet.
Nowadays, this seems practically impossible, as anyone competent enough to understand building half a weapon will be very likely capable of extrapolating to the full weapon in short order. Also, more than likely capable of bypassing any blocks society may establish to prevent communication between those with complementary knowledge.
Even if it was split 10 ways, the delay may only be a few years to decades until the knowledge is reassembled.
After thinking over this comment a bit more, I think the latter portions may have a point but the opening sentence is very unfortunate because it misleads to the exact opposite of reality.
Nuclear weapons, in a counterattack at least, are actually the least influenced by ‘the shape of the institutions involved’ of any current weapons, due to the immense time pressure negating nearly all plausible differences in institutional arrangements, societal structure, culture, etc…