A few days ago, when trawling through my many RSS feeds, I've encountered a small snippet which linked me to this article on Wired Magazine.

It amused me to no end that one of the Soviet leadership's justifications for constructing a full-scale doomsday device (and there's really no other way to describe an automated system that can launch an entire nuclear arsenal - other than Comrade Skynet), was that the people manning the various monitoring stations across the USSR were stupider, and more likely to cause global nuclear holocaust, than the automated system itself.

Which, incidentally, is still alive and well.

*hums old James Bond theme songs while digging a private nuclear shelter*

Anticipate charity by preventing poverty. - Rabbi Moshe ben-Maimon

Meanwhile, in the real world, Russia, the US, and the UK agreed to cut down existing stock piles of nukes in an effort towards global denucularizationing

"If I wanted to read Wuthering Heights, I'd shoot my self."

Anyway, even if it wasn't true about cutting back, there aren't nearly enough of them to actually destroy the world.

Dragon's Kingdom - Stop typing "alot" when you mean "a lot"! - Disappointed

Well, that depends on how accurate the Nuclear Winter theory is.

And for that matter, the follow-up theory of Nuclear Summer. Those who survive the former are unlikely to survive the latter.

The thing is, you don't need that much in terms of nuclear power to destroy life. Not unless you're willing to wait for the dying remains of our ecosystem to handle the rest.

Anticipate charity by preventing poverty. - Rabbi Moshe ben-Maimon

By 'dying remains of our ecosystem' do you mean as it is now, or as it would be after some nuclear detonations?

Dragon's Kingdom - Stop typing "alot" when you mean "a lot"! - Disappointed

Heh, after nuclear detonations, obviously.

Anticipate charity by preventing poverty. - Rabbi Moshe ben-Maimon

The ecosystem is getting greatly out of balance, but it's disingenuous to say it's dying. The ecosystem will certainly recover from the current changes.

Now, whether or not it will still be hospitable to humanity is another story altogether.