Schrodinger's Apocalypse

      Inside every British nuclear missile submarine there is a safe. Inside of that safe there is another safe. Inside that safe there is a sealed envelope that contains a letter from the Prime Minister to the sub's commander with instructions on what to do if Mother England has been annihilated by a nuclear strike. 

     That's what I love about the Brits. No coded cypher messages for them. Instead there is a nice sheet of vellum or foolscap, probably with a wax seal and ribbon affixed, and doubtless with a lovely crest of a lion and a unicorn humping a coat of arms to give the commander his marching orders for the apocalypse.

     Each new P.M. upon election creates and signs these doomsday letters for each of the U.K.'s four nuclear missile submarines, instructing them either to retaliate upon the presumed likely perpetrator, or to decline to compound the folly now that "there is really no point, old chap, now is there", and sail for some place less radioactive. No one knows what the letters say. They are burned unopened when a new P.M. comes to power.

     They exist in something rather like Schrodingers box, only instead of a cat, there are forty or fifty million people in the box who live or die the moment it is opened in some deadly quantum eigenstat.

     Be seeing you.