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I think the potential for deliberate use of a nuclear weapon is actually pretty low, because I think it is not a rational thing for any leader to do. I think the much more likely pathway to nuclear use is some kind of blunder, in a moment like we’re in right now: with Russia moving west into Ukraine.

Tensions are very high. Everybody is poised to react. Might we see some kind of unexpected incident, and misinterpret what’s happening — on either side of the equation — that would precipitate some kind of nuclear use, which could then escalate to an all-out exchange?

Joan Rohlfing

Since the Soviet Union split into different countries in 1991, the pervasive fear of catastrophe that people lived with for decades has gradually faded from memory, and nuclear warhead stockpiles have declined by 83%. Nuclear brinksmanship, proxy wars, and the game theory of mutually assured destruction (MAD) have come to feel like relics of another era.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has changed all that.

According to Joan Rohlfing — President of the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a Washington, DC-based nonprofit focused on reducing threats from nuclear and biological weapons — the annual risk of a ‘global catastrophic nuclear event’‘ never fell as low as people like to think, and for some time has been on its way back up.

At the same time, civil society funding for research and advocacy around nuclear risks is being cut in half over a period of years — despite the fact that at $60 million a year, it was already just a thousandth as much as the US spends maintaining its nuclear deterrent.

If new funding sources are not identified to replace donors that are withdrawing (like the MacArthur Foundation), the existing pool of talent will have to leave for greener pastures, and most of the next generation will see a career in the field as unviable.

While global poverty is on the decline and life expectancy increasing, the chance of a catastrophic nuclear event is probably trending in the wrong direction.

Joan points out that the New START treaty, which dramatically limits the number of warheads the US and Russia can deploy at one time, narrowly survived in 2021 due to the election of Joe Biden. But it will again require renewal in 2026, which may or may not happen, depending on whether the relationship between the two great powers can be repaired over the next four years.

Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons in 1994 in exchange for security guarantees that turned out not to be worth the paper they were written on. States that have nuclear weapons (such as North Korea), states that are pursuing them (such as Iran), and states that have pursued nuclear weapons but since abandoned them (such as Libya, Syria, and South Africa) may take this as a valuable lesson in the importance of military power over promises.

China has been expanding its arsenal and testing hypersonic glide missiles that can evade missile defences. Japan now toys with the idea of nuclear weapons as a way to ensure its security against its much larger neighbour. India and Pakistan both acquired nuclear weapons in the late 1980s and their relationship continues to oscillate from hostile to civil and back.

At the same time, the risk that nuclear weapons could be interfered with due to weaknesses in computer security is far higher than during the Cold War, when systems were simpler and less networked.

In the interview, Joan discusses several steps that can be taken in the immediate term, such as renewed efforts to extend and expand arms control treaties, changes to nuclear use policy, and the retirement of what they see as vulnerable delivery systems, such as land-based silos.

In the bigger picture, NTI seeks to keep hope alive that a better system than deterrence through mutually assured destruction remains possible. The threat of retaliation does indeed make nuclear wars unlikely, but it necessarily means the system fails in an incredibly destructive way: with the death of hundreds of millions if not billions.

In the long run, even a tiny 1 in 500 risk of a nuclear war each year adds up to around an 18% chance of catastrophe over the century.

Joan concedes that MAD was probably the best available system for preventing the use of nuclear weapons in 1950. But we’ve had 70 years of advances in technology since then that have opened up new possibilities, such as far more reliable surveillance than could have been dreamed up by Truman and Stalin. But MAD has been the conventional wisdom for so long that almost nobody is working on alternative paradigms.

In this conversation we cover all that, as well as:

  • How arms control treaties have evolved over the last few decades
  • Whether lobbying by arms manufacturers is an important factor shaping nuclear strategy
  • Places listeners could work at or donate to
  • The Biden Nuclear Posture Review
  • How easily humanity might recover from a nuclear exchange
  • Implications for the use of nuclear energy

Get this episode by subscribing to our podcast on the world’s most pressing problems and how to solve them: type ‘80,000 Hours’ into your podcasting app. Or read the transcript below.

Producer: Keiran Harris
Audio mastering: Ben Cordell
Transcriptions: Katy Moore

Highlights

Nuclear security funding situation

Joan Rohlfing: It’s not good, in short. I’d love to explain just a couple of significant events that have happened over the course of the last year that are really rocking the field, which is already small and under very significant stress. So a couple of major funders have decided, over the course of the last year and a half, to leave the field. One of them is the MacArthur Foundation. I think many of your audience are already familiar with that. MacArthur was investing very substantial resources — on the order of $18 to $20 million a year over the last five years — and that’s against a backdrop of a field that averaged about $60 million a year of philanthropic funding. So you can see that’s roughly a third of the —

Rob Wiblin: It’s a big chunk of change.

Joan Rohlfing: It is a really big chunk of change. And $60 million sounds like a lot, but it’s minuscule: for the philanthropic investment in the field, it’s minuscule compared to the size and scope of the problem.

Joan Rohlfing: There’s a second donor that has left the field that is not generally known, and it’s not somebody I can name. This is an anonymous donor of NTI’s in particular, who’s been donating at roughly the $15-million-a-year level. As you can imagine, that’s a pretty substantial impact on our operating budget. And if you add those two together, it looks more like a 45% to 50% reduction in available funding for the field. And so this hits a field that already is small, stressed, and shrinking.

Rob Wiblin: Surprisingly small.

Joan Rohlfing: Yeah. So it’s a period of high stress.

How the Ukraine situation could evolve into something much more dangerous

Joan Rohlfing: So here’s one scenario. We don’t know what Putin’s ultimate objective is. But if you look at a map of Europe, there is, from my perspective, a possibility that he doesn’t stop with Donetsk and Luhansk. And I think not only a possibility, perhaps — at this point, it looks like a likelihood.

Joan Rohlfing: If you look north on that map of Europe and you look at the Baltic states, and in particular, you look at this little piece of Russia, Kaliningrad — that sits just below Lithuania, and is wedged between Poland and Lithuania, and it’s separated from the rest of Russia. Is it possible that he works with Belarus to create a corridor that connects Kaliningrad with Russia? The only way you do that is you’d have to take territory either from Poland or from Lithuania, both of whom are NATO countries. So even if NATO says, “We’re a defensive [alliance]” — which it is: NATO is a defensive alliance — once a NATO member is attacked (which is, I think, not implausible), then NATO is at war. And to be honest, I think it’s difficult — if not impossible — to defend the Baltic states conventionally.

Joan Rohlfing: And there has been a lot of talk about either Russia or the US deciding to use a low-yield nuclear weapon as a warning shot to back off the other side. So what if either Russia or the US used a low-yield nuclear weapon, thinking, “This is just a small nuclear weapon”? Are we confident that that won’t escalate to a more significant nuclear use? How would the other side even know, when they see a missile launch, that you have a low-yield weapon on top? There’s no way to discriminate at the point of launch what the yield of the warhead is going to be.

Joan Rohlfing: So I think there’s a lot of uncertainty. And that’s just one scenario — I think there are probably a half a dozen other scenarios we could come up with. So this is a moment of really great danger that we’re in.

Key differences in the nuclear security field

Joan Rohlfing: Scott Sagan, who is a brilliant academic at Stanford University, did a seminal book on the limits of nuclear safety. This is back in the early ’90s. He looked at the incidence of accidents around nuclear weapons over the years and basically said there are two different ways of viewing this.

Joan Rohlfing: You have the optimists, who believe that we have very high-reliability organizations for managing the risks of nuclear weapons and inadvertent, accidental use of nuclear weapons. The people who believe in this so-called high-reliability organization, they believe that it’s designed smartly — that the redundancies and the training of the individuals in the system are going to prevent an inadvertent disaster from happening.

Joan Rohlfing: On the other hand, you have people who are more on the pessimistic side of the equation, and they believe in the “normal accident” model. The organizational theorists say a normal accident model posits that really complex systems — which the nuclear weapon system is — are greatly influenced by chance, accident, and luck. And complex organizations are likely to experience some kind of unexpected, even baffling interactions among components. I mean, when you think about how major accidents happen — industrial accidents, plane crashes, et cetera — it’s often a series of failures within the system.

Joan Rohlfing: So myself, based on my own years in the field and what I’ve observed, I would say I subscribe more to that normal accident model — the “shit happens” model — and we can’t bank on the system working perfectly for millennia. But many people in this field believe more in, “It’s a high-reliability organization. We train for this. Everything’s going to be OK. It’s been OK so far.” I would say, by the way, there are extremely smart senior people within the military, and even the civilian side of the nuclear establishment, on both sides of that equation. There is not a monolithic view about this.

Joan Rohlfing: The other point I want to make on this is particularly important: we have different perspectives about the possible pathways to nuclear use. We have, I would say, advocates for the current system and for maintaining nuclear deterrence strategy as it is today. And it drives a lot in terms of what we say about how we’re going to use them, our plans, the way we posture our forces. When I say nuclear deterrence strategy, I mean all of those things. The people who believe that nuclear deterrence strategy is stable and sustainable over a long period of time are principally focused narrowly on whether or not we can deter deliberate use by an adversary, and do that in a way that we have high confidence they won’t use them.

Joan Rohlfing: What worries me is, I think the potential for deliberate use of a nuclear weapon is actually pretty low, because I think it is not a rational thing for any leader to do. I think the much more likely pathway to nuclear use is some kind of blunder, in a moment like we’re in right now: with Russia moving west into Ukraine. Tensions are very high. Everybody is poised to react. Might we see some kind of unexpected incident, and misinterpret what’s happening — on either side of the equation — that would precipitate some kind of nuclear use, which could then escalate to an all-out exchange.

Joan Rohlfing: So when you look at the things you do to strengthen deterrence — to try and prevent deliberate use of a nuclear weapon — nuclear deterrence strategy does not address accidents. It does not address misinformation or bad intelligence. It was never designed to comprehend all of the pathways of use that lie outside of deterrence theory. So this is where some of the key differences are in the field. And some of us are just really worried that we’re so deeply entrenched in a very narrow way of thinking about nuclear use, that we’ve been unable to back up and see the forest for the trees.

What we should actually do

Joan Rohlfing: So we have an arm’s-length list of things that we think represent important interventions, but let me bundle it into three different buckets of activity that I think are important to reduce risks of nuclear use. By the way, I wouldn’t say these are prioritized. I think all three of these — there are maybe even four or five — different areas of investment that are important, and they need to happen simultaneously.

Joan Rohlfing: But near-term risk reduction is the first bucket: what can we do for as long as we are living with this (I think) increasingly risky strategy of nuclear deterrence, to reduce the risk that it fails? And to reduce the consequences if and when — I think it’s more likely when — it does fail? There are things we can do to dramatically reduce both the risk of use and the potential consequences if it does fail. So that’s bucket number one.

Joan Rohlfing: Bucket number two is how do we build a better system so that if it fails, if there’s a catastrophic failure, we aren’t looking at civilizational collapse? And that’s a longer-term challenge, but I think the contours of that system are pretty clear. We need to first decide that we want to build a better system that does not hold humanity at risk. And then we need to get to work.

Joan Rohlfing: And that leads to bucket number three. To do either bucket one (near-term risk reduction) or bucket two (design a better system), we really need to do a lot to open the Overton window. We need to do a lot to build a greater public awareness of this risk, to create the political space for change, to build some energy behind a vision of a better future — one that enables our species to sustain itself. We need to be better ancestors. At the moment, we’re not — we’re running off the cliff like lemmings.

Joan Rohlfing: I think we suffer from a massive failure of imagination if we say we can’t do better than a system that fails deadly for humanity. Why should we accept a system that potentially threatens the survival of the species? I just think that on the face of it, it’s absurd that we would think this is the best we can do. I will even concede that this was probably the best we could do in 1950. But my God, we’re almost 75 years out from that — we have a whole new technology toolkit that we can put to use to build a system that is not based on game theory.

Joan Rohlfing: Game theory principles require rational actors. Game theory principles require systems that work flawlessly. Game theory principles are not based on the possibility of accidents or behaviors that you can’t predict. It’s an inherently rational system. And what we see, and all of the near-misses we’ve had — the near-accidents and the accidents that we’ve had — show us that there are limits to what game theory can protect us from. Game theory was never a nuclear deterrence strategy specifically — it was never designed to address a whole series of the pathways to nuclear use, the potential failure points of the system.

Joan Rohlfing: I think we can design a better system that addresses those failure points and dramatically derisks the system. And no system is perfect — I personally believe if we’re talking about timeframes at the scale of millennia, any system will eventually fail. Let’s design one that can’t fail catastrophically for humanity.

Is it really possible to change things?

Joan Rohlfing: It’s hard, but it’s not impossible. I fundamentally believe change is possible. We have seen change occur in other fields — really substantial cultural shifts in terms of how we understand and think about issues — and I think that’s possible in the nuclear space as well. I think it’s pretty astonishing when you look at the shift in global perspectives around marriage equality. Over roughly a decadal period, we saw a really substantial shift that led to a cascade of changing laws around the world. The reason I think some of the public education and awareness work and opening the political window for change is so important on the nuclear side is that it’s going to take a demand pull to bring about the concrete near-term threat reduction changes that make us safer.

Joan Rohlfing: And just a word on that. I’ve had members of Congress tell me that, “Look, I’m with you guys. I agree with you — I want to see us take these near-term threat reduction steps. But my constituents don’t care about this issue. It’s not on their radar screen. I’m not hearing from them. And I’m just one guy on a committee. I can’t make this change all by myself. You have to help us make this issue relevant for people again.”

Joan Rohlfing: So in the nuclear space, we have examples of really positive changes, and we have examples of backsliding. And recently I would say we’ve been more, unfortunately, in the backsliding mode. Each time we reach a new arms control agreement, we’ve seen really amazing things happen when we develop the suite of agreements between the US and Russia — that capped and then dramatically limited the number of nuclear weapons we had.

Joan Rohlfing: And just a point on that: at the peak, the number of nuclear weapons in the world was around 70,000 — the vast majority of them, more than 90% of them, being held by the US and Russia. As a result of arms control agreements, the number of weapons in the world today is roughly 14,000. So that is a massive reduction in the number of nuclear weapons, and that’s a very positive thing. Now, if we lose the constraining treaties that are keeping us at those levels, and we continue to see growing competition and a new arms race, those numbers could go back up again. I worry a lot about that.

Joan Rohlfing: This is why, again, the political will is just so paramount here. We have seen a global movement on the humanitarian side — a recognition of the humanitarian effects — and it led to a new treaty that entered into force last year, called the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. And that’s a nascent treaty, but it’s the first treaty that outlaws nuclear weapons outright: the production, possession, and use of nuclear weapons.

Joan Rohlfing: Now, all of the nuclear weapon states are outside that treaty — in fact, they boycotted the negotiation itself. But it shows you that the vast majority of the world are states that don’t have nuclear weapons. And most of them are in this camp of wanting to prohibit nuclear weapons, because they understand, correctly, that they are hostage to the small number of states that have nuclear weapons. It’s not just nuclear weapon states that will bear the consequences of a major nuclear catastrophe — it’s pretty much all of us in the world.

Joan Rohlfing: So those would be some highlights. We see some glimmers of hope. We also see significant challenges ahead. But I think if we can help reestablish with publics what our equities are in this issue, we can help open up the space for change.

Why we can't rely on Stanislav Petrovs

Rob Wiblin: An audience member wrote in with this question: “How valuable is it for people in the effective altruism community to try to get into positions to make calls like the one that Stanislav Petrov made?” Petrov, of course, being the Russian official who decided not to retaliate against what turned out to be a false alarm of a missile attack from the US.

Joan Rohlfing: I really appreciate this question, because on the face of it, it might seem like this is a good idea — we’ll just put Stanislav Petrovs all throughout the system. I think that’s a strategy that is very unlikely to succeed, because we can’t bank on having enough Stanislav Petrovs all over the world at the moment that we need them.

Joan Rohlfing: But what it really points out is this systemic problem that we have: that we have a system that requires people to literally throw their bodies on the train track at a dire moment to prevent a disaster from happening. And the reason why we can’t count on this is, frankly, the system scrubs resistors like Stanislav Petrov out of the system. And I think his actions were the right actions, and we’re all grateful, and it was heroic. By the way, there are examples of others; Stanislav Petrov is not the only person who played that role. Both in the US and in the Soviet Union, there were other officers like Stanislav Petrov who have made similar judgments.

Joan Rohlfing: What’s fascinating to me is, in a way, every single one of them was a resistor. They resisted their training. They let their human judgment override what they had been taught to do, the way they had been taught to respond. As you might imagine, any military system doesn’t like people who buck the system and defy their training, so it’s not sustainable over time that we’re going to have enough people in the system at the right time. So then we need to look at what else we can do systemically to never put ourselves in that risky position to begin with.

Rob Wiblin: Yeah. It’s obviously not a very sustainable solution, because if most of the people in charge of launching nuclear weapons were unwilling to do so, then obviously the system would have to be changed. For example, it would have to be automated or something like that in order to take people out of the system, so that they can’t make that decision. So it’s the kind of thing that you might be able to get away with very briefly, but it’s no systematic solution to the issue here.

Articles, books, and other media discussed in the show

Joan’s and NTI’s work:

Book recommendations:

Ways to get involved in this space:

Joan’s recommended organisations

Donation, funding, and career opportunities

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Everything else:

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About the show

The 80,000 Hours Podcast features unusually in-depth conversations about the world's most pressing problems and how you can use your career to solve them. We invite guests pursuing a wide range of career paths — from academics and activists to entrepreneurs and policymakers — to analyse the case for and against working on different issues and which approaches are best for solving them.

The 80,000 Hours Podcast is produced and edited by Keiran Harris. Get in touch with feedback or guest suggestions by emailing [email protected].

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