Destroying the entire human race is not much different than vaporizing a hundred thousand people at Hiroshima.
The only thing that is certain is that in the future, the human race doesn’t exist.
I’d turn the key, but then again, I’m not a huge fan of humanity.
Not much different? I don’t believe you mean that. Vaporizing a hundred thousand people at Hiroshima compared to killing 99% of the entire human race, leaving the last 1% to either slowly die or live in bunkers for a few hundred years is not much different. Wow.
I’m sure you would turn the key. Just like everyone else on watch when glitches happened, and people thought the ICBMS were inbound. They said they’d turn the key too. Thank God they didn’t. They just couldn’t believe it was happening, or they couldn’t come to terms with what they were about to do. Either way MAD is a flawed concept. If it weren’t, we wouldn’t be discussing it, because we would have been dead along with everyone else, a long time ago.
The best thing to do would be to ensure that your nation is the only one that could turn a key. Even better than that is if no one had a key. Unfortunately we don’t live in a world like that. Someday, the wrong person is going to get their hands on a nuclear weapon, and they are going to detonate it.