Challenge: Think About Nuclear War Every Minute

    In 2022, I spent a significant portion of my time worrying about nuclear war. The Russian invasion of Ukraine was scary for everybody, but I estimated the likelihood of nukes flying at 10% throughout the crisis. It is really, really hard to live a normal life if you think that there is a 10% chance that everyone you know dies that year. Was I wrong in my estimate? JFK said that he thought the probability of nuclear war during the Cuban missile crisis was between 33% and 50%. During that crisis we now know that it very nearly happened, thanks to Vasili we scraped by. In 2022, the public simply couldn't have known about the close calls and near accidents behind the scenes. We simply had to read the rhetoric of Vladimir Putin and hope that the actions of the USA and NATO didn't back him into too deep of a corner. I think 10% was, in retrospect, a very fair estimate. Thankfully that number has dropped quite a bit recently.

    In addition to being substantially freaked out all year, I also read a bunch of books about nuclear history and nuclear war. It is insane that we lives our lives in spite of the terrifying fact that every moment we are a button click away from near annihilation. The chapter about Hiroshima in "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" by Richard Rhodes is seriously the most horrifying thing I have ever read. Then I read about global nuclear policy and how terribly accident and manipulation prone our nuclear systems are, and I realized we are still balancing on the edge of a knife. There's not really a solution to this problem. Obviously, we should try to minimize the risk of nuclear accidents and try to disarm the worldwide "Doomsday machine," but what really keeps things in balance is mutually assured destruction. It sucks that decision theory combined with world-ending weaponry is the main cause for the current near-peace in the world between global superpowers. Without these weapons I doubt we would have made it this long without a far reaching global conflict. We'll have to see how the world progresses with new technological weapons (such as AGI) that are winner-takes all and not beholden to mutually assured destruction.

    I have been thinking a lot less about nuclear war this year, as that fear has been replaced by AI. However, I don't think we should take our eyes completely off the ball. Nuclear risk could very well be an ex-risk, and I think that most people discount the probability just due to survivorship bias. No self-interested nation would ever give up all their nuclear weapons, and true world peace is not around the corner. Unfortunately, we will have this risk hanging over our heads for the duration of our lives. This sucks, so we should probably do our best with lobbying and donations to make it marginally less likely that the lives of us and our families will end in horrific deaths.