A couple of things that seem to be missing from this analysis is the reliability of the nukes that have not been tested for some 30 years, and might not even explode, since both sides rely on mathematical models to simulate the shelf life of the weapons. What is the chance of the model developers missing one critical factor out of many that go into the calculation? Humans are pretty bad at accounting for unknown unknowns. The other point is focusing on US vs Russia exclusively. China has some 10% nuclear capacity of each, and who knows what they would do if s*** hits the fan.
Hm, true. My impression is that they’d be pretty likely to explode though, and that each side has enough nukes where even if some didn’t explode, they would just use others, and so it is the desire to use a nuke that really matters. And yeah, I think the existence of China (and North Korea) does increase the risk slightly. Neither thing seems large enough to really sway the results I found though.
A couple of things that seem to be missing from this analysis is the reliability of the nukes that have not been tested for some 30 years, and might not even explode, since both sides rely on mathematical models to simulate the shelf life of the weapons. What is the chance of the model developers missing one critical factor out of many that go into the calculation? Humans are pretty bad at accounting for unknown unknowns. The other point is focusing on US vs Russia exclusively. China has some 10% nuclear capacity of each, and who knows what they would do if s*** hits the fan.
Hm, true. My impression is that they’d be pretty likely to explode though, and that each side has enough nukes where even if some didn’t explode, they would just use others, and so it is the desire to use a nuke that really matters. And yeah, I think the existence of China (and North Korea) does increase the risk slightly. Neither thing seems large enough to really sway the results I found though.
Russia dismantled all their Soviet-era bombs and used the fissionable material to make new bombs.
The US has probably started to do the same thing, but I don’t know how far along it is.