I’m wondering why not just call for mutual disarmament under IAEA supervision? There’s an old, but now very relevant episode of 80000 hours with Daniel Ellsberg;
I didn’t keep the time stamps, but he gets in to the approximate number of warheads a state should need as a deterrent, and says it’s probably not more than 100.
Luisa Rodriguez has an excellent post on the EA forum with fairly current estimates of the downstream effects of a nuclear exchange between US and Russia with the 2019 arsenal. She estimates a US-Russian nuclear exchange would result in a 5.1 to 58 Tg of schmutz entering the atmosphere, best guess is 31 Tg. (A NATO-Russia exchange would likey be more since would also involve France and the UK.)
31 Tg would put us in a “nuclear autum” but would be very close to a nuclear winter, just another couple Tg from a full NATO-Russia exchange would likely put us on the winter part of the sigmoid curve. (LW isn’t letting post images in the comment like it usually does, but relevant graphs are in the paper).
Taking Statista’s numbers and assuming the megatons about average out
Russia (5,977), USA (5,428), China (350), France (290), United Kingdom (225), Pakistan (165), India (160), Israel (90), North Korea (20).
Let’s say we capped everyone at 100, there’s less than 900 warheads in the world, we’re well under nuclear winter if the exchange is between two states. Even if the US and Russia just come down to 350 for parity with China, we’ve still substantially reduced the risk.
The ultimate recklessness I see here is that we haven’t discussed mutual nuclear disarmament in earnest as part of this war. When are we going to have a better opportunity? And if Putin is asked and he does anything other than enthusiastically agree, doesn’t that tell us everything we need to know?
I’m wondering why not just call for mutual disarmament under IAEA supervision? There’s an old, but now very relevant episode of 80000 hours with Daniel Ellsberg;
https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/daniel-ellsberg-doomsday-machines/
I didn’t keep the time stamps, but he gets in to the approximate number of warheads a state should need as a deterrent, and says it’s probably not more than 100.
Luisa Rodriguez has an excellent post on the EA forum with fairly current estimates of the downstream effects of a nuclear exchange between US and Russia with the 2019 arsenal. She estimates a US-Russian nuclear exchange would result in a 5.1 to 58 Tg of schmutz entering the atmosphere, best guess is 31 Tg. (A NATO-Russia exchange would likey be more since would also involve France and the UK.)
31 Tg would put us in a “nuclear autum” but would be very close to a nuclear winter, just another couple Tg from a full NATO-Russia exchange would likely put us on the winter part of the sigmoid curve. (LW isn’t letting post images in the comment like it usually does, but relevant graphs are in the paper).
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/pMsnCieusmYqGW26W/how-bad-would-nuclear-winter-caused-by-a-us-russia-nuclear#December_19__2019_Update
Taking Statista’s numbers and assuming the megatons about average out
Russia (5,977), USA (5,428), China (350), France (290), United Kingdom (225), Pakistan (165), India (160), Israel (90), North Korea (20).
https://www.statista.com/statistics/264435/number-of-nuclear-warheads-worldwide/
Let’s say we capped everyone at 100, there’s less than 900 warheads in the world, we’re well under nuclear winter if the exchange is between two states. Even if the US and Russia just come down to 350 for parity with China, we’ve still substantially reduced the risk.
The ultimate recklessness I see here is that we haven’t discussed mutual nuclear disarmament in earnest as part of this war. When are we going to have a better opportunity? And if Putin is asked and he does anything other than enthusiastically agree, doesn’t that tell us everything we need to know?