Obama: Eliminate Nuclear Weapons Sunday, Apr 5 2009
nuclear 9:43 am
In fantastic news, President Obama has given a major speech in Prague where he called on all nations to reduce their stockpiles of nuclear weapons, saying the US would lead but only continue its reduction if other nations followed. To me, who deeply fears nuclear weapons and has spent years arguing for their reduction, this is like a dream come true.
The number one risk to humanity right now is nuclear weapons. In my opinion, the four primary foreseeable catastrophic risks threatening civilization over the next 50 years are general nuclear war, out-of-control replicators, MNT arms races, and unfriendly AI. Moving into the 21st century, we are now seeing top-level efforts to deal responsibly with one out of four. If we deal with them all, we could get our civilization to the point where the risk of doom is negligible and we can survive for millions or billions of years in happiness.
You are right, nukes are a major threat to civilzation.
But do you really believe that the US or any other nuclear power wants to abandon nukes?
All they want is to stop the rise of new nuclear powers to keep their major military advantage and the ability to attack any power in the world for whatever noble reason the media feeds us with.
Imagine Iran as nuclear power. Do you believe that the US would threaten them with invasion, destruction etc. if Iranian nukes could reach Washington. Or take a look at North Korea, no one is threatening North Korea with military actions.
In a perfect world, their would be no need for nukes but in the real world a nuclear balance between opposing powers and the risk of total annihilation could be a price we would have to pay for freedom.
I don’t know what about human history or nature would lead anyone to conclude that “we can survive for millions or billions of years in happiness”, unless you have a religious belief in such things. It seems far more likely to me that nuclear weapons and other technologies of mass destruction are the solution to Fermi’s paradox–technological civilization is unstable and ultimately self-extincting. With all the crises converging on civilization in the next 50 years, I don’t think I’d put unfriendly AI high on the list of threats. I think a lot of you techno-utopians need a bit of a reality check, like maybe a trip to a third world country, to see how out of control and close to collapse our world really is. Scientific civilization sits at the top of a huge pyramid whose base is unstable, and the next big shock could take the whole structure down. If you really have dreams of AI and techno-utopia, you should probably hurry because the infrastructure to build it might soon be gone forever. Good luck.
Scientific civilization sits at the top of a huge pyramid whose base is unstable, and the next big shock could take the whole structure down.
agreed. the massive R&D needed for further technological innovation can only exist if the productive capacities of humanity aren’t all bent towards simple subsistence. With the population ever increasing tech is in a race against time. The thing about exponential growth is that everything looks fine until you reach the “knee” then everything hits the fan immediately.
Sean Taylor did you even read the post?
“we can survive for millions or billions of years in happiness”
Your quote was completely out of context. It was from the end of a paragraph about three risks (nuclear warfare, MNT arms races and Unfriendly AI) that Michael thinks are likely to destroy humanity.
“The number one risk to humanity right now is nuclear weapons.”
Michael, Totally agree. Elimination of nukes is a high priority. We seem to forget that there are nukes pointed at hundreds of millions of people.
But I would put nukes in the “really bad” rather than the “existential” category.
There are about 22,000 nukes. For a 1 MT nuke, 50% of people are dead out to about 3 miles. The surface area of the landmass of the Earth is about 5.9 x 10^6 square miles. So actually you would need about 630,000 1 MT nukes (spread over all parts of the world equally) to kill most people. Also, in about two weeks, fallout radiation levels would come down to the point where people could come outdoors.
So, we’re talking very bad, but not existential. I would rank self-replicating technology as a higher existential risk.
> But do you really believe that the US or any other nuclear power wants to abandon nukes?
The key is Russia. I think that the US would be willing to lay down our nukes if Russia were to also. Russia has this paranoia of being invaded (history of Napoleon, Hitler, NATO & all that). But they really don’t need nukes if the West puts ours down. A conventional invasion of Russia is unrealistic. it would be Vietnam x 100. No one could succeed in overthrowing Russia.
If Russia & the US were to agree to eliminate their nukes then I think that the UK & France would go along with the US. China wouldn’t want to be the only spoiler and would be happy for the US to put down its nukes and so I think that the Permanent 5 could disarm if only Russia were to agree.
If the Security Council members were to eliminate their nukes I think that about 190 out of the 194 countries in the world would also agree to a world-wide ban on nukes. Any country not going along could face withering sanctions.
BUT nuclear disarmament would have to be absolutely verifiable. There should be about four random inspections in every country every year in any location in that country. If there were ANY violation of any hidden nuclear program then it would have to be agreed that that country would immediately loose its right from invasion — No years-on-end, IAEA-delayed, hope-everyone-will-forget-our-violations wiggle room.
> but in the real world a nuclear balance between opposing powers and the risk of total annihilation could be a price we would have to pay for freedom.
Maybe, but if we don’t eliminate nukes now my fear is that the Middle East might start a nuclear arms race and then it might be nearly impossible to ever get total nuclear disarmament.
> the massive R&D needed for further technological innovation can only exist if the productive capacities of humanity aren’t all bent towards simple subsistence.
Nowadays technical knowledge is very persistent. For example, even if 90% of the world’s population were destroyed, within a few decades, in some new city, they would be using today’s knowledge and discovering and developing new biotech and accelerating knowledge.
They are aiming for 1000 a piece, which (not including everyone else’s) is plenty good enough to kill everything on the planet five times over. This is just feel good.
Martin and Stuart, eventually we could get to the point where the nuclear states have 100 weapons or less, which would be enough to give us a concrete military advantage over rogue states (which we have already) but not enough to risk causing nuclear winter. Yes, Obama does want to abandon nukes, he’s a pragmatic idealist like myself, not a defeatist skeptic.
Sean Taylor, that doesn’t mean a lot coming from someone whose blog is called the “doomer report” and who seems obsessed with doom for its own sake. Usually doomers like you welcome doom as a punishment or penalty for something you dislike about society. See Kelly’s post on collapsitarians.
John, you’re probably right. However, if many nukes are detonated near the ground, the fallout could be pretty bad and circle around the world, killing huge amounts of trees and animals and poisoning much of our water and food. This would provide an opportunity for the rise of an evil global dictatorship, which could exacerbate other, more serious risks. Pretty speculative, I know, but I regard general nuclear war as more dangerous than I used to. Also, extreme distaste for nuclear war and the encouragement of concrete steps to lower its probability is good practice for dealing with other risks. But if any risk is going to be ignored by us personally, it might as well be nuclear war because a lot of other prominent people are already focusing on it.
I sort of consider self-replicating technology to be a subset of MNT arms races, but honestly, you’re right, I should add out-of-control replicators in there. Did so, thanks. Yeah, I do think Russia is the key, and as an ethnic Russian who has family members that work in Russian/American non-profits and have extensive knowledge of Russian politics and life, I think making it happen would be very difficult but possible. If anyone can do it, Obama can.
There is NO way to this. Nukes are here to stay, until some more powerful agent will make them obsolete.
Until then, you can only increase the security against an accidental nuclear war.
Where did you get this President, I really wonder?
Michael, what’s your take on the risks that George Dvorsky raised in his (presciently posted a few days ago) article “The perils of nuclear disarmament: How relinquishment could result in disaster”? http://www.sentientdevelopments.com/2009/03/perils-of-nuclear-disarmament-how.html
John: People are far from evenly distributed. Also, you neglect (a) nuclear winter (b) infrastructural collapse. Still probably not likely to cause extinction, but both very serious.
Note: He also endorsed nuclear energy and the right of every country to develop a civilian nuclear programme under sufficient safe guards.
Herve, I think some of the points are good. I think that many of the benefits of nukes could be retained if there are only a few hundred per nuclear power worldwide instead of a few thousand.
I’m assuming you mean synth bio replicators first, conventional biotech second, and goo third in terms of importance, right?
Also, where does world-government totalitarian singleton or the like fall on that risk scale. It might be 2nd to UFAI.
Michael, yes, and I especially don’t take goo very seriously. World government I’m not as experienced about thinking about as I am about many of the others. For there to be a world government I think there has to be a general nuclear war that disables the military of 3 of 4 of China, Russia, USA, or EU. If at least two survives a singleton will not likely emerge. Some amount of nuclear weapons shared by more than one nation probably decreases the probability of a singleton forming. I see a voluntary unification or giving up of sovereignty to a world body to be unlikely, unless in an MNT or other fast-throughput manufacturing scenario, for which there is much more uncertainty due to less historical data and uncertainty about the precise nature of the fast manufacturing technology.
Yeah, you’re right, it might actually be 2nd to UFAI. I have a strong tendency to view the risk as a subset of MNT/AGI risks (especially MNT) because I find it hard to imagine a country/individual taking over the world without MNT or AGI.
The best and only way to eliminate threat of WMDs in the long term is to eliminate dictatorships, monarchies and such. If every country has democracy, Western-style basic freedoms and freedom of movement between countries and a lot of economic trade, people will probably not want a war. Any person who wants to engage in an Imperialistic war against a democracy is an evil fool. But yeah, the US should eliminate all their nuclear weapons, the EU nuclear weapons are enough.
How many decades have people been trying to get rid of nuclear weapons? Going on 7 decades. Let is measure their progress: 0%. Good luck, Obama! :)
“I especially don’t take goo very seriously”
I can’t imagine why not. Aerovores strike me as possibly the greatest danger we face.
As I’ve said before I feel that nukes are a good thing. MAD discourages war and encourages discussion, without nukes war becomes a lot more viable between the big powers.
*Bombs
*Bugs
*Goo
*Unf.A.I.
None of these are very nice on any scale. It doesn’t matter which ones you pick, any one can be hell on earth. The ones not listed are the a)bio-weapons and b)insane governments (nobody is off the hook on this one–NOBODY), you know; the powers that this bull$hit in motion. But the topic was nukes. Any reduction of these is a good thing, at least there is some talk.
I am in favor of MAD. MAD kills the killers.
So you’ve got one bullet in your gun and I have six (or a full clip–with explosive tips!), might as well invent the holster and come up with some rules. Aw Jeeze! Talkin’ about the bloody rules is what pisses everybody off! And then–and then another hairless ape re-invents gunpowder, and here we go again!
Some of the MAD talk I’d like to see would be: EVERYBODY target the aggressor. Just like in the silo: solder A won’t turn the key=solder B shoots solder A. Simple…yes? Since these things can not be uninvented, make them legal to have but illegal to use.
At least there is talk.
Woah amazing. I really adore viewing these articles
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