What is the problem?
Nuclear weapons that are armed at all times could kill tens of millions of people directly (e.g., Rodriguez, 2019a), and perhaps billions of people in the subsequent effects on climate and crop growth (Toon et al., 2019; Rodriguez, 2019b). The potential for extreme climate and crop effects in a so-called ‘nuclear winter,’ possibly leading to human extinction or irreversible societal change, is why nuclear risk is part of the existential risk (x-risk) landscape.
Nuclear weapons have been used twice before in warfare, by the US on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in World War II. The Cuban Missile Crisis, a tense military standoff between the US and the Soviet Union in 1962, is well known as a moment when the world came close to all out nuclear war. And there have been many ‘close calls’ over the past few decades, when nuclear weapons were nearly used either deliberately or accidentally. The annual risk of nuclear conflict is estimated to be around 1% (Aird, 2021c), and Joan Rohlfing, President at the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI), thinks the annual risk of major nuclear conflict is around 0.5%: ‘I assign about a half percent risk per year to the potential for a global catastrophic nuclear event’ (2021).
Who else is working on the problem?
There are NGOs and think tanks working on ‘mainstream’ (i.e., not explicitly x-risk-focused) nuclear security, such as RAND, Global Zero, and NTI. Their approaches differ from ours. In very broad strokes, mainstream nuclear security work focuses on preventing nuclear conflict from happening at all, whereas our focus in the x-risk community is on avoiding the worst nuclear conflicts - those that carry the tail risk of existential catastrophe - and on raising the chance that humanity will recover after a nuclear catastrophe. Please note that these are indeed broad strokes, and part of why we can draw something of a clear distinction is that the work going into nuclear risk reduction within the x-risk community has been neither large in quantity nor diverse in scope: nuclear x-risk has around 12 full-time equivalents, and around two-thirds of this total comes from one organisation - ALLFED (Aird, 2021a).
Governments also give nuclear risk a lot of funding and attention. And some of this does reduce nuclear risk, for example through non-proliferation efforts, conflict-preventing diplomacy, successful arms control agreements, and perhaps even effective deterrence. Nonetheless:
Much of that government funding and attention is focused on reducing risk to a particular nation or on advancing national security, as opposed to reducing global risk, let alone global catastrophic risk or x-risk.
Much of that government funding and attention may in fact increase global risk and/or x-risk (e.g., by development of new weapons).
Example Projects
The ERA research agenda on nuclear risk, which draws substantially from work Rethink Priorities is carrying out in this space, and which ties in strongly with Aird’s Nuclear risk research ideas [draft] (2022), can be broadly divided into three categories:
Modelling the effects of specific nuclear conflicts that might occur between pairs of states, or groups of states. For instance, conflicts between:
India and Pakistan
China and the US
Exploring uncertainties that apply across a range of possible nuclear scenarios, examples being:
What are the ways in which a nuclear war could begin and then evolve?
How does the number of people dying from starvation vary with severity of crop yield decline?
How might future technologies, such as hypersonic missiles/glide vehicles and artificial intelligence, interact with nuclear risk?
Finding, cataloguing, and evaluating different intervention options - such as public advocacy, international treaties, and improving key actors’ decision making - for reducing nuclear risk.
Longtermist Policy Ideas: Nuclear Weapons
