The more items on the list of nuclear near-misses, the more convinced you should be that de-escalation works, no matter how close we get to nuclear war.
That’s an interesting argument, but it ignores the selection effect of survivor bias. If you play Russian roulette many times and survive, that doesn’t mean that the risk you took was small. Similarly, if you go with the Xia et al estimate that nuclear winter kills 99% of Americans and Europeans, the fact that we find ourself being in that demographic in 2022 doesn’t mean that the past risks we took were small: if you do the Bayesean calculation, you’d find the most likely world for a surviving Americans or European in 2022 would be a world where no nuclear winter had occurred, even if the ab initio risk was quite large.
You can also make direct risk estimates. For example, JFK estimated that the risk of nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis was about 33%. And he said that not knowing about the Arkhipov incident. If Orlov’s account is accurate, then there was a 75% chance of a nuclear attack on the US that day, since there was only a 25% probability that Arkhipov would have been on that particular one of the four nuclear-armed subs.
If we live to 2080 and, in that time, double the total number of nuclear near-misses, would you feel like that was evidence that baseline nuclear risk in any single incident is on average higher or lower than you currently think?
That’s an interesting argument, but it ignores the selection effect of survivor bias. If you play Russian roulette many times and survive, that doesn’t mean that the risk you took was small. Similarly, if you go with the Xia et al estimate that nuclear winter kills 99% of Americans and Europeans, the fact that we find ourself being in that demographic in 2022 doesn’t mean that the past risks we took were small: if you do the Bayesean calculation, you’d find the most likely world for a surviving Americans or European in 2022 would be a world where no nuclear winter had occurred, even if the ab initio risk was quite large.
You can also make direct risk estimates. For example, JFK estimated that the risk of nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis was about 33%. And he said that not knowing about the Arkhipov incident. If Orlov’s account is accurate, then there was a 75% chance of a nuclear attack on the US that day, since there was only a 25% probability that Arkhipov would have been on that particular one of the four nuclear-armed subs.
If we live to 2080 and, in that time, double the total number of nuclear near-misses, would you feel like that was evidence that baseline nuclear risk in any single incident is on average higher or lower than you currently think?
Where is the 99 % coming from? I can’t see it in the paper.