Results for “nuclear war”
241 found

*Nuclear War: A Scenario*

by  Tyler Cowen in

By Annie Jacobsen, a very good book.  What would happen if a nuclear weapon actually were launched at the United States?  On the ground?  In the chain of command?  Organizationally and otherwise?  A good book, sadly still of relevance.  Full of drama throughout, and tactically astute.  Excerpt:

Ted Postol is blunt.  “Russian early-warning satellites don’t work accurately,” he says.  “As a country, Russia doesn’t have the technological know-how to build a system as good as we have in the United States.”  This means “their satellites can’t look straight down at the earth,” a technology known as look-down capability.  And as a result, Russia’s Tundra satellites “look sideways,” Postol warns, “which handicaps their ability to distinguish sunlight from, say, fire”

Notably troublesome is how Tundra sees clouds.

It was North Korea who started the whole thing, you can buy the book here.

Protecting against nuclear war

by  Tyler Cowen

Several design changes could be made to the decision-making process to make it safer, according to Cerf. The first would be to remove the 15-minute response time, which forces a US president to launch on warning. Cerf argues this hair-trigger response procedure is a “relic of the past”, considering that the US would retain a second-strike capability by air and sea even if all its land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles were destroyed.

Cerf also thinks that key decision makers should repeatedly practise emergency drills and analyse their responses to learn from their mistakes. They could also conduct “pre-mortems”, in which they imagine worst-case outcomes and then work backwards to see how they could be avoided. Another tweak would be to appoint one member of the decision-making team to oppose the consensus. Rachel Bronson, president and chief executive of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which has been warning of the dangers of nuclear war since 1945, hopes that Cerf’s forthcoming film will raise awareness and help nudge the world towards a saner, safer future. “What Moran is doing is very important,” she tells me at the PopTech conference. When it comes to nuclear launch protocols, she adds: “We need to rethink every aspect of this system and push for more time and more engagement and more democracy.”

In November, the Union of Concerned Scientists, another campaigning organisation, wrote to President Joe Biden urging him to revise the nuclear launch protocol. Any launch order should require the consent of two high-level officials in the presidential line of succession, the scientists wrote. “As the risk of nuclear war continues to grow, you have the power to take concrete, immediate steps to build a more stable nuclear weapons system, one that isn’t subject to the whims and questionable judgment of one person alone.”

Here is more from John Thornhill at the FT, an important piece and of course topic.

Optimism about the threat of nuclear war

by  Tyler Cowen in

From an email from Trey Howard, I won’t impose further double-indent on it:

“I recently came across the pessimistic Edward Luce column you retweeted, and wanted to offer some trends that I think point in the opposite direction. I offer these as someone who was much more worried about nuclear war in the first 2 weeks of the war, before the factors below became apparent.

  1. Putin has been willing to revise his objectives. The Russian army fell back from Kyiv, did not launch an amphibious assault on Odessa, and has not attempted to storm the Azovstal steelworks. All of these indicate that Putin is receiving some objective information about the poor performance of his military, and is revising his plans accordingly.
  2. Putin’s objectives are amorphous. What does it mean to de-nazify Ukraine? What does control of “the Donbass” mean exactly? These kinds of objectives are susceptible to BS-ing for the domestic audience. They are not like “Kill Zelensky” or “Capture Kyiv”. They permit Putin an off-ramp at any time he wants to declare victory.
  3. NATO is unwilling to intervene directly. If anything, I have heard less chatter about no fly zones since the first two weeks of the war.
  4. Putin has not escalated to chemical weapons, despite having an opportunity to use them effectively on the Azovstal works.
  5. NATO has limited the supply of weapons to short range weapons that a) do not require a complex supply chain of trainers and contractors close to Ukraine or b) are unlikely to cause mass casualties in Russia itself (airplanes, tactical ballistic missiles). This seems likely to continue for the foreseeable future. For all the breathless talk of “heavy weapons” being shipped to Ukraine, it is hard for me to imagine that Russia sees T-72 tanks, towed howitzers, or M113 personnel carriers from the 1970s as tilting the balance. They have thousands of comparable weapons in storage.
  6. Russia has not attempted to interdict the flow of weapons inside NATO countries. Not even “plausibly deniable” things like train derailments or warehouse fires. This is all the more remarkable when you consider that the GRU committed attacks in NATO countries in the years before the war started.
  7. Putin is not threatened at home. If anything, support for the invasion seems to have increased. The Russian economy has not collapsed as some predicted, and this will bolster support for him.
  8. Russia continues to make payments on its foreign debt. To me this indicates a long-term outlook and is not the kind of thing one would do if contemplating murder-suicide at a national level.
  9. Russia has not increased the readiness of its strategic nuclear forces (like putting SSBNs to sea).
  10. Russia is actively recruiting foreign mercenaries and seems likely to order a general mobilization soon. Some people see this as a sign of escalation, but I think it is more likely that Putin realizes that he needs more bodies to garrison captured territory. Additional conscripts will eventually allow some of the BTGs in action to rotate away from the front lines. It will increase his perception that time is on his side. More troops will make it less likely that Ukraine can inflict a decisive defeat on Russian forces in the Donbass (which might really precipitate tactical nuclear weapon use).
  11. Russia is taking over administration of infrastructure in captured territory, and is preparing residents to switch to the ruble. These are long-term thinking measures consistent with a power planning to occupy and administer new territory (which they would not want to irradiate).
  12. Putin thinks that the political winds are on his side. Viktor Orban being re-elected, Le Pen performing better than her prior showing, and the coming midterms in the USA all point to populations becoming impatient at the high inflation and constant drumbeat of scary news coming out of Ukraine. Of course, the biggest break for him would be Trump 2024…

I disregard all public statements from Russia (whether from state TV, Putin himself, or lesser officials). There is never going to be a situation where the Russians say “relax, we aren’t going to use the nukes”. They want to keep us guessing. I look at the trends above instead.

Many of these trends are bad news for Ukraine and the west in general, but they are factors that make nuclear war less likely. As you said on a recent podcast “things are never as bad or as good as you might think.””

TC again: That’s it, have a cheery day!

Who is working on creative solutions to limit nuclear war risk?

by  Tyler Cowen in

I don’t mean on the macro foreign policy side, but more the micro elements.  For instance, how do we make sure all countries with nuclear weapons have accurate early warning systems, so they do not confuse flocks of birds with incoming missiles?

Your suggestions do not have to be credentialed in the traditional sense, but they should be smart, curious, and hard-working, at the very least.

I thank you in advance for the nominations.

Addendum: I am looking for actual suggestions and will delete all “soapbox” comments.

What is the Probability of a Nuclear War, Redux

by  Alex Tabarrok in

Reupping this post from 2019. No indent.

I agree with Tyler who wrote recently that “the risk of nuclear war remains the world’s No. 1 problem, even if that risk does not seem so pressing on any particular day.”

The probability of a nuclear war is inherently difficult to predict but what strikes me in this careful survey by Luisa Rodriguez for the Effective Altruism Forum is how much higher all the expert predictions and model forecasts are compared to what we would like them to be. Keep in mind that the following are annualized probabilities. For a child born today (say 75 year life expectancy) these probabilities (.0117) suggest that the chance of a nuclear war in their lifetime is nearly 60%, (1-(1-.0117)^75). At an annualized probability of .009 which is the probability from accident analysis it’s approximately 50%. See Rodriguez and also Shlosser’s Command and Control on the frightening number of near misses including one nuclear weapon dropped on North Carolina.

These lifetime numbers don’t strike me as crazy, just crazy high. Here is Rodriguez summarizing:

If we aggregate historical evidence, the views of experts and predictions made by forecasters, we can start to get a rough picture of how probable a nuclear war might be.[8] We shouldn’t put too much weight on these estimates, as each of the data points feeding into those estimates come with serious limitations. But based on the evidence presented above, we might think that there’s about a 1.17% chance of nuclear war each year and that the chances of a US-Russia nuclear war may be in the ballpark of 0.39% per year.

Addendum: A number of people in the comments mention that the probabilities are not independent. Of course, but that doesn’t make the total probability calculation smaller, it could be larger.

From my email, on Putin and nuclear war

by  Tyler Cowen

I just visited the front page of the NYT, WaPo, Der Spiegel’s International section, and FT and there is not a single story about Putin casually inserting the threat of nuclear war in yesterday’s press conference. However, if you scroll down on Daily Mail’s front page Putin’s threat of nuclear war is mentioned.

I think post-Cold War we have irresponsibly decreased our fear of nuclear war than is wise.

That is from Naveen K.  Here is news.google.com on the threat, as I am reading the Colorado Springs Gazette is the leading entry.

What is the Probability of a Nuclear War?

by  Alex Tabarrok in

I agree with Tyler who wrote recently that “the risk of nuclear war remains the world’s No. 1 problem, even if that risk does not seem so pressing on any particular day.”

The probability of a nuclear war is inherently difficult to predict but what strikes me in this careful survey by Luisa Rodriguez for the Effective Altruism Forum is how much higher all the expert predictions and model forecasts are compared to what we would like them to be. Keep in mind that the following are annualized probabilities. For a child born today (say 75 year life expectancy) these probabilities (.0117) suggest that the chance of a nuclear war in their lifetime is nearly 60%, (1-(1-.0117)^75). At an annualized probability of .009 which is the probability from accident analysis it’s approximately 50%. See Rodriguez and also Shlosser’s Command and Control on the frightening number of near misses including one nuclear weapon dropped on North Carolina.

These lifetime numbers don’t strike me as crazy, just crazy high. Here is Rodriguez summarizing:

If we aggregate historical evidence, the views of experts and predictions made by forecasters, we can start to get a rough picture of how probable a nuclear war might be.[8] We shouldn’t put too much weight on these estimates, as each of the data points feeding into those estimates come with serious limitations. But based on the evidence presented above, we might think that there’s about a 1.17% chance of nuclear war each year and that the chances of a US-Russia nuclear war may be in the ballpark of 0.39% per year.

Addendum: A number of people in the comments mention that the probabilities are not independent. Of course, but that doesn’t make the total probability calculation smaller, it could be larger.

Don’t relax about nuclear war

by  Tyler Cowen in

That is the theme of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one bit:

Each generation has its own form of recency bias, as it is called in behavioral economics. Just after Sept. 11, for example, there was great concern about follow-up attacks. (Thankfully, nothing comparable followed.) Now we worry a lot — maybe too much — about insolvent banks, insufficiently high inflation, and the Chinese shock to U.S. manufacturing.

So what about nuclear war? Looking forward, the reality is that the risks of such a war are quite small in any particular year. But let the clock run and enough years pass, and a nuclear exchange of some kind becomes pretty likely.

I have found that people with a background in financial market trading are best equipped to understand the risks of nuclear war. An analogy might be helpful: Say you write a deeply out-of-the-money put, without an offsetting hedge. This is in fact a very risky action, though almost all of the time you will get away with it. When you don’t, however — when market prices move against you — you can lose all of your wealth quite suddenly.

In other words: Sooner or later the unexpected will come to pass.

And:

Meanwhile, a generation of hypersonic delivery systems, being developed by China, Russia and the U.S., will shorten the response time available to political and military leaders to minutes. That raises the risk of a false signal turning into a decision to retaliate, or it may induce a nation to think that a successful first strike is possible. Remember, it’s not enough for the principle of mutual assured destruction to be generally true; it has to be always true.

Do read the whole thing, which includes a discussion of Steven Pinker as well.

Trey Howard, arguing nuclear risk is low

by  Tyler Cowen in

From my email:

“Recent headlines prompted me to revisit the list I sent earlier this year. The situation is grim but unlikely to lead to nuclear weapons.

  1. Ukrainian military power is over-rated. It still seems like we are giving Ukraine 1/10th of the equipment they would need to actually eject the Russians. Entire categories of weapons are missing: fixed wing aircraft, modern tanks and infantry fighting vehicles. This is reflected in limited battlefield gains. Ukraine can make regional moves like Kharkiv, or bite off salients like Lyman but can’t make the kinds of sustained maneuvers hundreds of miles deep that have ended prior wars. It’s telling how many of their troops are still riding in civilian vehicles. Without huge improvements in airpower and mobility, I think future gains will continue to be incremental. This is still bad news for Russia, but slower gains provide more time for Putin to adjust plans and expectations.
  2. Russian military power is under-rated. The dominant narrative is that Russia’s shambolic mobilization will fail. It’s still too early to tell.  It’s possible that many of the reservists are truck-drivers and stevedores that will actually improve Russia’s supply chain issues. Commentators scoff at the tactical benefits of mobilization, but that’s not really how to interpret this move. Putin assumed a huge political risk in a bid that shows he still believes the war can be won conventionally.
  3. No one is crossing red lines. The Russians have staked out a red line on the provision of long range missiles, and Biden has not budged on that. You don’t hear talk about a NATO no fly zone like we did at the start of the war. Russia has avoided NATO borders in strikes to interdict the flow of weapons (which are infrequent now).
  4. Russia has not used chemical weapons. There have been ample opportunities to use them, and these weapons are perceived as carrying a lower penalty to use than nukes.
  5. Russia has more non-nuclear “compellence” options. The mysterious Nordstream sabotage was a reminder that Russia has abundant non-nuclear dirty tricks. These include flinging more old anti ship missiles at Ukrainian cities and striking grain haulers in the Black Sea. Watch those Iranian drones.
  6. Russia believes it will win the energy war. It seems obvious that this will leave both Russia and the EU poorer than they started before the war. Who will cry uncle in the next 6-9 months? Russia thinks Germany.
  7. International political trends still favor Russia. Meloni is not a Putin admirer, but her victory still sends a message that Western publics are skeptical of a pro-Ukraine elite consensus. Elections in Sweden also show this. Let’s see what happens in the US congressional elections. India and China are still buying Russian oil, and they abstained from Friday’s security council vote.
  8. Putin’s reign at home remains secure. This is one where Twitter will really lead you astray. Choosing my words carefully…certain people in our media see populations everywhere as perennially on the cusp of radical change. I see thousands of gloomy men shuffling obediently onto troop transports. Their economy has not collapsed; we have consistently underrated the Russian population’s support (or indifference) to this war, and after 8 months no popular generalissimo has emerged from the battlefield who could rival Putin.
  9. Russian nuclear threats are rational. It is obvious that a) NATO will not launch a first strike and b) NATO has a decisive conventional advantage over Russia. Neither of those things were true in the Cold War, so Russian nuclear threats today seem jarring. We should continue to see them as warnings not to intervene directly rather than foreshadowing imminent use.

I worry more about fast-moving problems for Putin. A Ukrainian victory that threatens his control over the entire theater would raise the risks (but see point 1). I thought he might make some kind of outrageous, short term ultimatum this week (“you have 2 weeks to leave our land”), but he did not.

I think often of your column earlier this year about our bad habit of doom-scrolling. The surest way to escalate this war would be for us to do it ourselves. I think Putin is willing to wait this out for a very long time. Are we?

Trey

PS – So many dramatic things have happened over the past eight months. Ukraine has launched air raids on Russia itself. Biden made several unprecedented gaffes about regime change. Lithuania briefly embargoed Kaliningrad. Nothing came of them, but at the time each seemed very dangerous. Is it possible that the standard metaphors of nuclear war are not capturing this new reality? I hear about 100-sided die where one face is nuclear war, or Herman Kahn’s ladder. Steadily increasing levels of risk.

Maybe there is something more like Taleb’s notion of “anti fragility” here? Below a certain threshold each provocation actually makes nuclear war *less* likely the next time around? Leaders have time to adjust to situations that would previously have been intolerable…etc. Something to consider the next time you read an article that says “dramatic escalation” or “heightening tensions.””

TC again: There you go! My apologies to Trey if a nuke has been dropped between putting this on auto-publish, going to bed, and actual publication.

*War and Punishment*

by  Tyler Cowen in

The author is Mikhail Zygar, and the subtitle is Putin, Zelensky, and the Path to Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine.  I have to tell you the subtitle put me off and I nearly didn’t buy this one, as too many books in this area repeat the same (by now) old material.  But after some extensive scrutiny in Daunt Books, I decided it was for me.  And I was right.  It is by far the best book on the origins of the war, both historical and conceptual, and for that matter it gives the literary history as well.  Here is one excerpt:

…the Clinton administration’s approach is even blunter: Washington will not discuss anything with Kyiv until Ukraine gives up its Soviet-inherited nuclear arsenal: 176 intercontinental ballistic missiles, able to carry 1,272 nuclear warheads and 2,500 tactical nuclear weapons.  True, Ukraine cannot actually fire them: all the control systems are located in Russia. But Clinton and his diplomats echo the same mantra: any economic aid to Ukraine is contingent on all nuclear weapons being relocated to Russia. Kravchuk tries to resist, demanding compensation and security guarantees, in return.  In the end, Kravchuk gets the promises he wants.

Among many other sections, I enjoyed the discussion of how revolutionary the 1770s were:

But an even more transformative decade is the 1770s, which sees the birth of the global political and geographical structure as we know it today, the start of the Industrial Revolution, and the laying of the foundations of the modern economy.  James Watt invents the steam engine; Adam Smith writes An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations; Captain James Cook reaches the shores of Australia and New Zealand.  Curiously at the same time a new type of political confrontation emerges — the struggle not for one’s homeland or monarch but also abstract values.  It is the 1770s that give rise to both populism and the liberal idea.

Definitely recommended, this will make my best non-fiction of the year list.

Transcript of taped conversations among German nuclear physicists (1945)

by  Tyler Cowen in

Here is one excerpt:

> HEISENBERG: […] I believe this uranium business will give the Anglo–Saxons such tremendous power that EUROPE will become a bloc under Anglo–Saxon domination. If that is the case it will be a very good thing. I wonder whether STALIN will be able to stand up to the others as he has done in the past.
[…]
> WIRTZ: It seems to me that the political situation for STALIN has changed completely now.
> WEIZSÄCKER: I hope so. STALIN certainly has not got it yet. If the Americans and the British were good Imperialists they would attack STALIN with the thing tomorrow, but they won’t do that, they will use it as a political weapon. Of course that is good, but the result will be a peace which will last until the Russians have it, and then there is bound to be war.[…]

> KORSHING: That shows at any rate that the Americans are capable of real cooperation on a tremendous scale. That would have been impossible in Germany. Each one said that the other was unimportant.

Here is the link, via Fernand Pajot.

Where the AI extinction warning goes wrong

by  Tyler Cowen in

There is so much to say about this one, in my view it has been counterproductive for all those worried about AI safety.  Here is one excerpt from my latest Bloomberg column:

Sometimes publicity stunts backfire. A case in point may be the one-sentence warning issued this week by the Center for AI Safety: “Mitigating  the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.”

…The first problem is the word “extinction.” Whether or not you think the current trajectory of AI systems poses an extinction risk — and I do not — the more you use that term, the more likely the matter will fall under the purview of the national security establishment. And its priority is to defeat foreign adversaries. The bureaucrats who staff the more mundane regulatory agencies will be shoved aside.

US national security experts are properly skeptical about the idea of an international agreement to limit AI systems, as they doubt anyone would be monitoring and sanctioning China, Russia or other states (even the UAE has a potentially powerful system on the way). So the more people say that AI systems can be super-powerful, the more national-security advisers will insist that US technology must always be superior. I happen to agree about the need for US dominance — but realize that this is an argument for accelerating AI research, not slowing it down.

A second problem with the statement is that many of the signers are important players in AI developments. So a common-sense objection might go like this: If you’re so concerned, why don’t you just stop working on AI? There is a perfectly legitimate response — you want to stay involved because you fear that if you leave, someone less responsible will be put in charge — but I am under no illusions that this argument would carry the day. As they say in politics, if you are explaining, you are losing.

The geographic distribution of the signatories will also create problems. Many of the best-known signers are on the West Coast, especially California and Seattle. There is a cluster from Toronto and a few from the UK, but the US Midwest and South are hardly represented. If I were a chief of staff to a member of Congress or political lobbyist, I would be wondering: Where are the community bankers? Where are the owners of auto dealerships? Why are so few states and House districts represented on the list?

I do not myself see the AI safety movement as a left-wing political project. But if all you knew about it was this document, you might conclude that it is. In short, the petition may be doing more to signal the weakness and narrowness of the movement than its strength.

Then there is the brevity of the statement itself. Perhaps this is a bold move, and it will help stimulate debate and generate ideas. But an alternative view is that the group could not agree on anything more. There is no accompanying white paper or set of policy recommendations. I praise the signers’ humility, but not their political instincts.

Again, consider the public as well as the political perception. If some well-known and very smart players in a given area think the world might end but make no recommendations about what to do about it, might you decide just to ignore them altogether? (“Get back to me when you’ve figured it out!”) What if a group of scientists announced that a large asteroid was headed toward Earth. I suspect they would have some very specific recommendations, on such issues as how to deflect the asteroid and prepare defenses.

Do read the whole thing.  You will note that my arguments do not require any particular view of AGI risk, one way or the other.  I view this statement as a mistake from all points of view, except perhaps for the accelerationists.

Lessons from the Baruch Plan for Nuclear Weapons

by  Tyler Cowen in

The invention of atomic energy posed a novel global challenge: could the technology be controlled to avoid destructive uses and an existentially dangerous arms race while permitting the broad sharing of its benefits? From 1944 onwards, scientists, policymakers, and other technical specialists began to confront this challenge and explored policy options for dealing with the impact of nuclear technology. We focus on the years 1944 to 1951 and review this period for lessons for the governance of powerful technologies, and find the following: Radical schemes for international control can get broad support when confronted by existentially dangerous technologies, but this support can be tenuous and cynical. Secrecy is likely to play an important, and perhaps harmful, role. The public sphere may be an important source of influence, both in general and in particular in favor of cooperation, but also one that is manipulable and poorly informed. Technical experts may play a critical role, but need to be politically savvy. Overall, policymaking may look more like “muddling through” than clear-eyed grand strategy. Cooperation may be risky, and there may be many obstacles to success.

That is by Waqar Zaidi and Allan Dafoe, at the Centre for Governance of AI, exactly the kind of work people should be doing.

Will a nuclear weapon be launched in combat by the end of 2023?

by  Alex Tabarrok

This prediction is from Manifold Markets. Metaculus gives similar odds to a similar question. These are serious predictions.

In a 2019 post I pointed out that expert surveys (not markets) suggested the annualized probability of a nuclear war was on the order of  ~1%–and I thought that was worryingly high. We are now at ten times that level. This is very, very bad.