[fennecfoxy]

Do they, though?

Didn't Russia have the dead man's hand system where any detected launches would result in a completely automatic response?

But in the reality of an arm's race, I guess the core point is that we either: respond to autonomous weapons with our own and break our principle of having a human in the loop, or accept that our offence/defence with a human in the loop is not fast enough to keep up with an enemy's fully autonomous systems, thereby just completely giving up.

Just as with nuclear weapons, the unfortunate outcome isn't "well they're bad so we don't want them" but instead it's "we don't want these, but we have to out of necessity".

What if Russia was the only country with nuclear weapons and all other countries held steadfast principles of not building any nuclear weapons? Pretty obvious outcomes to be honest.

[Vecr]

Dead hand was probably (though to what confidence I don't know) people in a remote mountain bunker. It's not actually any better to have the computer fire, it just provides the people information. Retaliation does not have to be instant, 40 minutes is probably good enough.

[News-Dog]

Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_assured_destruction

Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) - Second-Strike Capability : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_assured_destruction#Sec...

>Perfect detection

No false positives (errors) in the equipment and/or procedures that must identify a launch by the other side.

The implication of this is that an accident could lead to a full nuclear exchange.

During the Cold War there were several instances of false positives, as in the case of Stanislav Petrov[2].

[2] Stanislav Petrov : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov

[2] 1983 Soviet Nuclear False Alarm Incident : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Soviet_nuclear_false_alar...