  It has been suggested that chaotic motion inside the nucleus may
significantly limit the accuracy with which nuclear masses can be calculated.
Using a power spectrum analysis we show that the inclusion of additional
physical contributions in mass calculations, through many-body interactions or
local information, removes the chaotic signal in the discrepancies between
calculated and measured masses. Furthermore, a systematic application of global
mass formulas and of a set of relationships among neighboring nuclei to more
than 2000 nuclear masses allows to set an unambiguous upper bound for the
average errors in calculated masses which turn out to be almost an order of
magnitude smaller than estimated chaotic components.
