Does anyone know of any zero-trust investigations on nuclear risk done in the EA/Rationalist community? Open phil has funded nuclear work, so they probably have an analysis somewhere that concluded it is a serious risk to civilization, but I haven’t ever looked into these analyses.
Thanks, Peter. That draft assumes global cooperation, which is likely too optimistic, so we have submitted another draft that also analyzes the case of breakdown of trade (hopefully public soon). We also have this paper that looks at the US specifically and takes into account food storage (and uncertainty of whether nuclear war would result in nuclear winter).
For the one paper, it is too early to tell. For the other, there just has not been very much engagement. Mainly the public debate has been between the Robock team, which is highly confident that full-scale nuclear war would cause nuclear winter, and the Los Alamos team, which is highly confident that full-scale nuclear war would not cause nuclear winter. We find the truth is likely somewhere in between. I talked about this in one of my 80k podcasts. Our analysis is quite similar to Luisa Rodriguez’ analysis that cubefox links to below.
Would it be possible for you to make a post with a brief summary of what you expect to happen in a nuclear exchange? I think a lot of people would be interested in something like that given the recent talk about the possibility of nuclear war from the Russia-Ukraine war.
Skimming the methodology it seems to be a definite improvement and does tackle the short-comings mentioned in the original post to some degree at least.
Does anyone know of any zero-trust investigations on nuclear risk done in the EA/Rationalist community? Open phil has funded nuclear work, so they probably have an analysis somewhere that concluded it is a serious risk to civilization, but I haven’t ever looked into these analyses.
ALLFED has been doing research recently into nuclear winter. This seems to be their most relevant publication so far. I haven’t read it yet.
Thanks, Peter. That draft assumes global cooperation, which is likely too optimistic, so we have submitted another draft that also analyzes the case of breakdown of trade (hopefully public soon). We also have this paper that looks at the US specifically and takes into account food storage (and uncertainty of whether nuclear war would result in nuclear winter).
I was looking for exactly something like this! Thanks for posting. How were these two papers received in your field?
For the one paper, it is too early to tell. For the other, there just has not been very much engagement. Mainly the public debate has been between the Robock team, which is highly confident that full-scale nuclear war would cause nuclear winter, and the Los Alamos team, which is highly confident that full-scale nuclear war would not cause nuclear winter. We find the truth is likely somewhere in between. I talked about this in one of my 80k podcasts. Our analysis is quite similar to Luisa Rodriguez’ analysis that cubefox links to below.
Would it be possible for you to make a post with a brief summary of what you expect to happen in a nuclear exchange? I think a lot of people would be interested in something like that given the recent talk about the possibility of nuclear war from the Russia-Ukraine war.
Skimming the methodology it seems to be a definite improvement and does tackle the short-comings mentioned in the original post to some degree at least.
Like this?