Thermonuclear madness is back in fashion
Generations since WW2 grew up with the looming existential terror of sudden nuclear annihilation without warning.
However, since the dissolution of the USSR in 1991, little thought has been given to such concerns. That may be about to change.
The Russian Navy has an autonomous nuclear propelled submarine carrying a nuclear warhead with a yield of ~2-90 Megaton, potentially even greater than the largest nuclear bomb ever detonated, the Tsar Bomba (50Mt).
The damage would be far worse than a typical airborne MIRV warhead. Because of the essential incompressibility of water, one of these warheads would create an enormous wall of superheated pyroclastic steam capable of destroying half the US seaboard, or all of Western Europe, in a single blast.
The bomb also has been designed with the capability to salt the earth and sea with long-half life isotopes, rendering the last utterly uninhabitable for decades or centuries.
The Russian Navy plans to deploy 30 of these devices in the coming years.
The weapon is capable of being deployed by the latest Russian Navy submarines far from home, and as it is nuclear powered and autonomous it can roam for months at a time, potentially even years. Similar nuclear-propelled nuclear-armed airborne versions are also under active development.
Putting such a weapon in the hands of AI control seems like a very bad idea.
Yes, even an autonomous weapon must surely have manual interlocks that prevent detonation without the right signal.
But we are living in an increasingly crazy and unimaginable world – the world is only getting stranger as systemic fragility from ever-increasing integration grows.
Such weapons could be set to Dead Hand mode at a high DEFCON level (and we have approached such levels before many times in history), and then refuse to stand down afterwards (or go stealth to such a degree that they cannot be located).
Even in a time of peace and geopolitical détente, a Carrington Event-style solar flare might create such havoc and panic in defense networks that the weapon enters a Dead Hand mode which cannot be shut down afterwards, as the requisite satellite downlinks to communicate with it are destroyed.
Autonomous WMDs are an egregiously imprudent development affecting all of humanity, and *must* be banned immediately.