A view of stress corrosion cracking (SCC) is presented in which stress intensity (K) thresholds are an artifact of impatient or improper laboratory testing, and/or a probabilistic element of the crack advance process at constant load. An apparent K threshold arises from a decreasing probability of sustaining a crack growth rate as the growth rate itself decreases. This is supported by large shifts in apparent threshold K as a function of, e.g., seemingly small water chemistry changes. This concept can be conceptually extended to initiation data, which represents a balance between innumerable initiation sites and low probabilities of initiating and sustaining crack advance.