[crispinb]

You're ignoring the many cases meticulously documented from official sources by Schlosser and others where accidents and rogue orders only didn't set off a world-scale nuclear war because of lucky breaks (literally in some cases -- the hardware breaking) and disobedient underlings. There is really little debate about this amongst historians. The documents are there.

Run the experiment several times, and this luck inevitably runs out. Continue with nuclear weapons, and there just will be a nuclear war.

[Filligree]

I've read the books, and frankly it's freaky. It looks a lot like anthropic selection, which is a conclusion I don't want to come to--and which should be false, it's not like nuclear war would cause extinction.

I don't have a good explanation for that number of coincidences, though.