The excess pessimism of early nuclear bomb designers

From GPT Pro: The Manhattan Project scientists were remarkably good technological and arms-race forecasters. They correctly rejected the idea that America’s nuclear monopoly could be maintained; the Soviet bomb arrived in 1949. They anticipated thermonuclear weapons, huge arsenals and the extreme vulnerability of cities. Where many of them went wrong was in moving from “a nuclear war would be catastrophic” to “therefore a catastrophic nuclear war is fairly likely.” They tended to underweight the...