EDIT: Removed “nuclear arsenal not working because Russia didn’t bother to maintain them” as I don’t find that especially likely on reflection.
An aside on the level of destruction we can anticipate: Nuclear war is not an existential threat.[1]Fears of nuclear winter, which may be an existential threat[2], are likely overblown as the well known soot production model is based on poor research. Soot production in the high atmosphere is like 1-2 orders of magnitude below what the original studies suggested.
Strategy suggests that military targets, ports and sites of industrial production would serve as far better targets than highly populated regions or areas with large amount of flammable material which could create soot. Some important military bases, like missile silos, are hardened against nuclear weapons and would require two consecutive strikes to confidently take down. Which reduces the number of war heads available for non-military targets.
Nuclear warheads are shrinking in number, and are quite difficult to maintain so there are fewer usable warheads than you might expect. Moreover, the most famours soot production studies make a wide variety of errors, which later simulations didn’t bear out. The amount of suit produced by nuclear war is much lower due to strategic reasons, the difference between usable nuclear weapons and ones which could theoretically be used, an incorrect scaling law for the burn area-nuclear yield relationship, improperly accounting for oxygen starvation and the low likelihood of foot reaching the upper troposphere which is crucial to the nuclear winter mechanism.
That said, there hasn’t been enough research on the topic and we can’t be too sure of what would happen if there was all out nuclear war. Maybe some exotic effects would occur and instead of hundreds of millions of deaths it would be billions. Or perhaps the damage to logistic chains and global norms would be enough to cripple our civilization. But the soot production thing? Probably not going to kill us all.
That wasn’t something I’ve put actual thought into, or was something that came from an expert I trusted. Maybe it is true, but I’d need to think more about it before I was OK with claiming it was so. And I just didn’t feel like doing that.
Algon, please provide references to peer-reviewed journals supporting your claims that smoke predictions are overblown, etc. Since there’s a steady stream of peer-reviewed papers quantifying nuclear winter in serious science journals, I find myself unconvinced by criticism that appears only on blogs and without the detailed data, GitHub code, etc. that tends to accompany peer-reviewed research. Thanks!
Uh, the blog posts I linked to do reference peer reviewed journals which criticize soot production models or the evidence for them[1]. Here is a post on the EA forum that does provide a model and the data they used to generate it, along with plenty of references, and has incorporated the critiques of one researcher who studies nuclear winter. The article’s conclusion is in the same direction as the blog posts I linked to.
I’m confused, the EA Forum post you linked seems to roughly agree with the nuclear winter doomers like Xia et al, not with the more optimistic datasecretlox thread you linked earlier. Quote from the EA Forum post:
By my estimation, a nuclear exchange between the US and Russia would lead to a famine that would kill 5.5 billion people in expectation (90% confidence interval: 2.7 billion to 7.5 billion people).
Mostly I was talking about the soot production. I think it is less doomy than normal for nuclear winter doomers, which is why I said directionally. But yeah, it is a lot more doomy than Bean is. I should have noted that in my comment.
EDIT: Removed “nuclear arsenal not working because Russia didn’t bother to maintain them” as I don’t find that especially likely on reflection.
An aside on the level of destruction we can anticipate: Nuclear war is not an existential threat. [1]Fears of nuclear winter, which may be an existential threat[2], are likely overblown as the well known soot production model is based on poor research. Soot production in the high atmosphere is like 1-2 orders of magnitude below what the original studies suggested.
Strategy suggests that military targets, ports and sites of industrial production would serve as far better targets than highly populated regions or areas with large amount of flammable material which could create soot. Some important military bases, like missile silos, are hardened against nuclear weapons and would require two consecutive strikes to confidently take down. Which reduces the number of war heads available for non-military targets.
Nuclear warheads are shrinking in number, and are quite difficult to maintain so there are fewer usable warheads than you might expect. Moreover, the most famours soot production studies make a wide variety of errors, which later simulations didn’t bear out. The amount of suit produced by nuclear war is much lower due to strategic reasons, the difference between usable nuclear weapons and ones which could theoretically be used, an incorrect scaling law for the burn area-nuclear yield relationship, improperly accounting for oxygen starvation and the low likelihood of foot reaching the upper troposphere which is crucial to the nuclear winter mechanism.
That said, there hasn’t been enough research on the topic and we can’t be too sure of what would happen if there was all out nuclear war. Maybe some exotic effects would occur and instead of hundreds of millions of deaths it would be billions. Or perhaps the damage to logistic chains and global norms would be enough to cripple our civilization. But the soot production thing? Probably not going to kill us all.
They’re by Bean, a commentator on ACX and datasecretslox. The thread he started on nuclear winter has some good discussion on the topic.
Bostrom, “Existential Risks” v.3, 1.1.1
What reflection changed your probability here? The probability here seems non-zero to me, and maybe likely.
EDIT: not sure what the down votes are about. Curious as to what made you change your mind.
That wasn’t something I’ve put actual thought into, or was something that came from an expert I trusted. Maybe it is true, but I’d need to think more about it before I was OK with claiming it was so. And I just didn’t feel like doing that.
Algon, please provide references to peer-reviewed journals supporting your claims that smoke predictions are overblown, etc. Since there’s a steady stream of peer-reviewed papers quantifying nuclear winter in serious science journals, I find myself unconvinced by criticism that appears only on blogs and without the detailed data, GitHub code, etc. that tends to accompany peer-reviewed research. Thanks!
The Reisner et al paper (and the back and forth between Robock’s group and Reisner’s group) casts doubt on this:
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/2017JD027331?fbclid=IwAR0SlQ_naiKY5k27PL0XlY-3jsocG3lomUXGf3J1g8GunDV8DPNd7birz1w
Uh, the blog posts I linked to do reference peer reviewed journals which criticize soot production models or the evidence for them[1]. Here is a post on the EA forum that does provide a model and the data they used to generate it, along with plenty of references, and has incorporated the critiques of one researcher who studies nuclear winter. The article’s conclusion is in the same direction as the blog posts I linked to.
I was just presenting the gist of it for people who don’t like clicking on links.
I’m confused, the EA Forum post you linked seems to roughly agree with the nuclear winter doomers like Xia et al, not with the more optimistic datasecretlox thread you linked earlier. Quote from the EA Forum post:
Mostly I was talking about the soot production. I think it is less doomy than normal for nuclear winter doomers, which is why I said directionally. But yeah, it is a lot more doomy than Bean is. I should have noted that in my comment.
Thanks for this. The Bean thread reassures me somewhat.
I don’t know what it said pre-edit but your description sounds like it was directionally accurate (depending on how strongly it was worded).