1.

It's October 1962. The Cuban missile crisis just happened, thankfully without apocalyptic nuclear war. But still:

• Apocalyptic nuclear war easily could have happened.
• Crises as serious as the Cuban missile crisis clearly aren’t that rare, since one just happened.

You estimate (like President Kennedy) that there was a 25% chance the Cuban missile crisis could have escalated to nuclear war. And you estimate that there's a 4% chance of an equally severe crisis happening each year (around 4 per century).

Put together, these numbers suggest there's a 1% chance that each year might bring nuclear war. Small but terrifying.

But then 62 years tick by without nuclear war. If a button has a 1% chance of activating and you press it 62 times, the odds are almost 50/50 that it would activate. So should you revise your estimate to something lower than 1%?

[...]

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Outline:

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(11:50) 10.

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First published:

Source:

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.