Originally Posted by CrazyPerson
Great points. I'm going to try and pan out the steps and counter steps.
The launch protocols are standalone, but the targeting systems aren't. This US might have isolated systems but... the other countries might not.
The targeting problem should be surmountable, given time. They'd simply need to isolate targeting systems, then manually calculate trajectories not based on GPS or other networked systems, not impossible. They could then also communicate with other countries and warn them that they're using nukes not as a first-strike against countries but simply to let them all regain their sovereignty too.
The only problem is confirming that the toy factory has the quantum computer. Since the nuclear option is, quite literally, the nuclear option, they need hard evidence that it's in South Africa and there's no duplicate. Everybody only suspects it's in Africa; there's no actual confirmation. So the plan of action is a) confirming the number of quantum computers and b) confirming their location. It'll be hard to disprove the number of computers and confirming their location.
Of course, given enough time and enough madmen in the world with nukes, someone might think that it's worth taking a shot. Maybe Koko would inform the world that if something gets launched, she wipes every networked computer in that country. Any country that relies on computers gets sent back to the stone age, ignoring hardened, disconnected networks that would definitely exist (but are only military). The civilian computers become bricks and kills the economy until they can reinstall all OSs and restore records from offline and paper, likely years of setback.
But then a country could cut their internet, then nuke. But then A whole country network outage is prior warning to the nuclear options. So maybe she threatens to use some other country's networked nukes against them? Not likely any unprotected nukes will be left after the long term though...
However, the nuclear option only works if there's one quantum computer but there's no guarantee that it's only one and not ten.
Over the long enough time period however, country militaries, industries, and critical supply lines harden their systems to all work offline and less efficient that now, but still let them wage war. Probably war resumes at a pre-World War One level soon. But it'll guarantee peace for ages.
TL;DR: Over the short-term, countries can nuke to win, but only if they can 100% confirm the location of every quantum computer and nuke them all at the same time. Over the long-long-long term, everybody goes back to pre-World War I tech and fights that way.
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