Ask HN: Do you think nuclear armageddon is plausible?
by mysecretaccount on Hacker News.
With all the talk about escalation amid the Russia-Ukraine crisis, I have been reading about this and am wondering about the odds of this occurring. The main counterargument I see to this happening goes like: any world leader calling for nuclear armageddon will not be obeyed/will be assassinated because they cannot convince the entire chain of command to commit suicide. This seems flaky to me. One other thought I had is that perhaps that we are not capable of nuclear armageddon, because this has not been tested end-to-end, although ICBMs and nukes have been tested quite extensively. What does HN think? Could it happen?