Security – a sibilant intake of breath

Proud Prophet and how nuclear wars end

The National War College is located inside the National Defense University, which is located just across the river from the Pentagon. Each day, to play the [1983 Proud Prophet war] game, the secretary of defense would pick up a red phone and call the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to discuss various ideas in the different nuclear war scenarios put forth by [Thomas] Schelling. Schemes included everything from tactical nuclear strikes in a so-called limited nuclear war, to massive decapitation-event scenarios. There were exercises with NATO and without NATO nuclear forces getting involved. There were scenarios where the U.S. launched nuclear war preemptively, beginning with everyone at the Pentagon in a state of focused calm. There were exercises where nuclear war was launched in crisis mode. In full-on panic mode. With and without China entering the conflict. With and without the UK involved.

Paul Bracken, a professor of political science at Yale, was one of the civilian individuals invited to participate in playing the classified nuclear war game. The results were horrifying, Bracken says. Over the course of two weeks, in every simulated scenario—and despite whatever particularly triggering event started the war game—nuclear war always ended the same way. With the same outcome. There is no way to win a nuclear war once it starts. There is no such thing as de-escalation.

According to Proud Prophet, regardless of how nuclear war begins, it ends with complete Armageddon-like destruction. With the U.S., Russia, and Europe totally destroyed. With the entire Northern Hemisphere uninhabitable from fallout. With the death of, at minimum, a half billion people in the war’s opening salvo alone. Followed by the starvation and death of almost everyone who initially survived.

Jacobson, Annie. Nuclear War: A Scenario. Penguin, 2024. p. 174

Ellsberg on the Cuban Missile Crisis

If Khrushchev had not, surprisingly, initiated an abrupt, humiliating withdrawal of his missiles Sunday morning—without even waiting for an official American response to his proposal of Saturday morning, which Kennedy had argued to his advisors was “very reasonable”—there was every likelihood of the fuse to all-out war being lit by that afternoon.

How close did that come? As close as the unpredictable decision of one man to overrule two others on a Soviet submarine [preventing the use of a nuclear torpedo of which the Americans knew nothing], or the inaccuracy of Cuban antiaircraft gunners (improving every hour) on their first day of firing at live targets. Far greater than one in a hundred, greater that day than Nitze’s one in ten. And that was for reasons which I didn’t know, and no other Americans knew, for thirty and in some cases forty years. The world has yet to absorb the lessons of this history—the story of how the existence of humanity was placed in great, unjustifiable danger by men who had no intention of doing that, men who recoiled from ending human history, or from taking what they saw as a high or even significant risk of doing so.

A primary lesson I draw from this episode is that the existential danger to humanity of nuclear weapons does not rest solely or even mainly on the possibility of further proliferation of such weapons to “rogue” or “unstable” nations, who would handle and threaten them less “responsibly” than the permanent members of the Security Council, nor does it rest merely on the vagaries of the smaller and more recent nuclear weapon states of Israel, India, Pakistan, and North Korea (though these do enhance the dangers).

What a true history of the Cuban missile crisis reveals is that the existence of masses of nuclear weapons in the hands of leaders of the superpowers, the United States and Russia—even when those leaders are about as responsible, humane, and cautious as any we have seen—posed then, and still do, intolerable dangers to the survival of civilization.

Ellsberg, Daniel. The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner. Bloomsbury, 2017. p. 220–1

Schneier at SRI

This afternoon I was lucky to attend a talk at the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society by esteemed cryptography and security guru Bruce Schneier. He spoke about “Integrous systems design” and how to build artificially intelligent systems that provide not just availability and confidentiality, but also the assurance that systems will exhibit correct behaviour which can be verified.

One interesting project mentioned in the talk is Apertus, a Swiss large language model (LLM) which was developed by three universities with government funding, without a profit motive, and without copyright infringement in the training data:

Apertus was developed with due consideration to Swiss data protection laws, Swiss copyright laws, and the transparency obligations under the EU AI Act. Particular attention has been paid to data integrity and ethical standards: the training corpus builds only on data which is publicly available. It is filtered to respect machine-readable opt-out requests from websites, even retroactively, and to remove personal data, and other undesired content before training begins.

I will give it a try and see if I can find any behaviours that differ systemically from Gemini and ChatGPT.

P.S. As an added bit of Bruce Schneier-ishness, when he signed my copy of Rewiring Democracy: How AI Will Transform Our Politics, Government, and Citizenship he included a grid of letters which decode pretty easily into a simple message:

O H O E
O E Y N
K B T J

It’s just a Transposition Cipher (an anagram), and one which follows a simple pattern.

Nuclear risks briefing

Along with the existential risk to humanity posed by unmitigated climate change, I have been seriously learning about and working on the threat from nuclear weapons for over 20 years.

I have written an introduction to nuclear weapon risks for ordinary people, meant to help democratize and de-mystify the key information.

The topic is incredibly timely and pertinent. A global nuclear arms race is ongoing, and the US and Canada are contemplating a massively increased commitment to the destabilizing technology of ballistic missile defence. If citizens and states could just comprehend that nuclear weapons endanger them instead of making them safe, perhaps we could deflect onto a different course. Total and immediate nuclear weapon abolition is implausible, but much could be done to make the situation safer and avoid the needless expenditure of trillions on weapons that will (in the best case) never be used.

Nuclear powers could recognize that history shows it only really takes a handful of bombs (minimal credible deterrence) to avert opportunistic attempts from enemies at decapitating attacks. States could limit themselves to the most survivable weapons, particularly avoiding those which are widely deployed where they could be stolen. They could keep warheads separate from delivery devices, to reduce the risk of accidental or unauthorized use. They could collectively renounce missile defences as useless against nuclear weapons. They could even share technologies and practices to make nuclear weapons safer, including designs less likely to detonate in fires and explosions, and which credibly cannot be used by anyone who steals them. Citizens could develop an understanding that nuclear weapons are shameful to possess, not impressive.

Even in academia and the media, everything associated with nuclear weapons tends to be treated as a priesthood where only the initiated, employed by the security state, are empowered to comment. One simple thing the briefing gets across is that all this information is sitting in library books. In a world so acutely threatened by nuclear weapons, people need the basic knowledge that allows them to think critically.

P.S. Since getting people to read the risk briefing has been so hard, my Rivals simulation is meant to repackage the key information about proliferation into a more accessible and interactive form.

Progress in uranium enrichment for weapons

In 1946, few if any could have imagined the dramatic effects technological change would bring. At the time, the prevailing image of uranium enrichment was the gaseous-diffusion plant built at Oak Ridge: a facility of such enormous scale that it employed at its wartime peak some 12,000 people, enclosed forty-four acres under a single roof, and by 1945 consumed nearly three times the electricity of the heavily industrialized city of Detroit. By the 1960s, the enrichment challenge had changed completely. Using centrifuges, a handful of engineers and a few dozen technicians could build a plant capable of enriching uranium for one bomb per year. It would fit in a high-school cafeteria, and could be powered by a single diesel generator. In 2014, such a centrifuge plant might be had for as little as $20 million.

Kemp, R. Scott. “The Nonproliferation Emperor Has No Clothes: The Gas Centrifuge, Supply-Side Controls, and the Future of Nuclear Proliferation.” International Security (2014) 38 (4): 39–78.

Canada and the ‘Golden Dome’

Canada’s connection to US ballistic missile defence efforts goes back a long way and is interwoven with our shared history of continental air defence.

Now, Trump is proposing a ‘Golden Dome’ to supposedly make America safer from foreign threats, and Canada is part of the discussions.

Recently, the American Physical Society released a detailed free report: “Strategic Ballistic Missile Defense: Challenges to Defending the U.S.”

The basic weaknesses of the whole concept are simple to understand: it takes drastically more expense and hardware to (possibly) stop one missile than it does for a challenger to build one more missile. As a result, the technology is inherently likely to fuel arms races, as foreign challengers fear their deterrents will lose credibility.

Rivals: Experiential education on nuclear weapon proliferation

I have been searching for ways to get people to engage with the risks to humanity created by nuclear weapons.

The whole issue seems to collide with the affect problem: the commonplace intuitive belief that talking about good or bad things causes them to happen, or simply the instinct to move away from and avoid unpleasant issues.

Pleasant or not, nuclear weapon issues need to be considered. With the US-led international security order smashed by Donald Trump’s re-election and extreme actions, the prospect of regional arms races in the Middle East and Southeast Asia has never been greater and the resulting risks have never been so consequential.

To try to get over the ‘unwilling to talk about it’ barrier, I have been writing an interactive roleplaying simulation on nuclear weapon proliferation called Rivals. I am working toward a full prototype and play-testing, and to that end I will be attending a series of RPG design workshops at next month’s Breakout Con conference in Toronto.

I am very much hoping to connect with people who are interested in both the issue of nuclear weapon proliferation and the potential of this simulation as a teaching tool.

Trump ending the postwar security order

Having read extensively about international security and the post-WWII US-backed security order, it is very disturbing to see it all being smashed apart. From Foreign Affairs today:

Carrying out economic warfare on allies sows distrust and risks fracturing the transatlantic and Indo-Pacific security architectures that have underpinned global stability for decades. If Washington imposes tariffs on European and Asian allies, it will create a wedge that adversaries such as China and Russia will eagerly exploit. Beijing, for example, is seeking to drive a deeper divide between the U.S. and Europe by presenting itself as a more reliable economic partner. For its part, Moscow is capitalizing on transatlantic tensions to weaken NATO cohesion. The growing strategic partnership between these two authoritarian powers—cemented through military cooperation, economic agreements, and shared hostility toward the West—represents a direct challenge to the U.S.-led global order. By undermining trust with allies through indiscriminate economic aggression, Washington risks isolating itself at a time when maintaining strong, unified alliances is more critical than ever.

I think my work on regional nuclear weapons proliferation is going to become a lot more pertinent-seeming in the weeks, months, and years ahead.

Working on geoengineering and AI briefings

Last Christmas break, I wrote a detailed briefing on the existential risks to humanity from nuclear weapons.

This year I am starting two more: one on the risks from artificial intelligence, and one on the promises and perils of geoengineering, which I increasingly feel is emerging as our default response to climate change.

I have had a few geoengineering books in my book stacks for years, generally buried under the whaling books in the ‘too depressing to read’ zone. AI I have been learning a lot more about recently, including through Nick Bostrom and Toby Ord’s books and Robert Miles’ incredibly helpful YouTube series (based on Amodei et al’s instructive paper).

Related re: geoengineering:

Related re: AI:

General artificial intelligences will be aliens

[A]rtificial intelligence need not much resemble a human mind. AIs could be—indeed, it is likely that most will be—extremely alien. We should expect that they will have very different cognitive architectures than biological intelligences, and in their early stages of development they have very different profiles of cognitive strengths and weaknesses (though, as we shall later argue, they could eventually overcome any initial weakness). Furthermore, the goal systems of AIs could diverge radically from those of human beings. There is no reason to expect a generic AI to be motivated by love or hate or pride or other such common human sentiments: these complex adaptations would require deliberate expensive effort to recreate in AIs. This is at once a big problem and a big opportunity.

Bostrom, Nick. Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies. Oxford University Press, 2014. p. 35