Strategic assessments feign certainty about untested nuclear weapons systems

Evidence

Most attempts to assess the strategic balance also conformed to our model in that they pretended to greater certainty than the information actually permitted. They did not deal adequately with the large number of unknowns that characterize the complex weapons systems that have never been used. Would missiles have been as accurate when fired over the North Pole as they were on test ranges? Could a large number of missiles have been fired simultaneously? How vulnerable were various targets? How would nuclear explosions have affected communications systems? What would be the environmental effects of a war? This list could be readily expanded even if we ignored questions about human behavior. Indeed, there may be crucial questions that we do not even know enough to ask—only in the past decade did people think about the effects of explosions on world climate. — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 2612

Categorization

• QUESTION: What other ‘unknown unknown’ questions did nuclear analysis miss — and what current domains have the same structural problem of untested escalating systems?
• CANDY: The fact that nuclear winter effects weren’t even considered until the 1980s is a striking conversation piece about blind spots in expert models.