I have a question about nuclear weapons. Anyone here know much about them?

[truedelphi]

7. I cannot answer your question, But I think it an excellent one

To ask about.

However, when reading over a Jeremy Rifkin book (The one about clocks and time: don't remember the title) he mentions this scarey thought about modernization and computers:

In Oct of 1987 our nation had a huge set back on Wall Street. because human beings could still interrupt the scenario, someone threw a huge wad of money at the Financial Markets and stopped the system from crashing out.

Rifkin talks about this financial mishap and then reports that due to "modernization" of the stock market trading system, the system is now under the guidance of computers. Which is one possible explanation for that other stock market dive we had back in 2009 (or maybe 2010?) No one really understood why the market took a fall, but fall it did. The big problem with the computers running the Wall St trading is that the computers "adjust" to the market going into free fall, by actually accelerating the market free fall.


And Rifkin then goes on to state that this is the same situation with the "modernization" of the military. Our computers are now more in control of the nuke situation - with far fewer allowances for human "interference."


Do you remember/ were you around back in the late seventies and early eighties when such natural phenomena as on one occasion, a full moon, and on another, extra large flocks of geese triggered panic in our defense department? Because we had human being still there to evaluate the occurring phenomena, we did not launch our missiles - despite the warnings that our radar was showing. Humans figured out that we didn't need to nuke Russia back to the stone age just because the full moon was extra close to the earth for 72 hours. Or that the geese were impacting the radar systems and setting off warnings.

Now our military is bragging about the "modernization" and computer upgrades - but this might be the end of civilization and not something that actually protects us.

Back in the Eisenhower/Kennedy era, our defense contractors were greedy, as always, but they also intervened, even at a cost to them in terms of profit, if upgrades were going to destroy civilization. Now those in charge don't care.