Normally, one might make the charitable assumption that an organization with a name like "Atomic Science and Security Board" does something other than spout political messages. It seems plausible that they might be a body of experts assessing the relationship between the world's nuclear powers and communicating their analysis through an easy to understand metaphor. Unfortunately, they chose a metaphor that holds them accountable, and now that they're run out of metaphorical hours and minutes with which to communicate deterioration in the situation, they make a mockery of themselves with every press release.
The situation is grave, but the Doomsday Clock is a joke.
I would suggest that they ought to have focused more on the threat of global thermonuclear annihilation and less on climate change. There is no shortage of focus on climate change these days, and the metaphor of the doomsday clock was much a more powerful and literal one when focusing on such weapons (the idea of a clock at five minutes to midnight being: the clock could start up again at any moment, and in five minutes, you would be dead).
Folding "climate change" into that makes only slightly more sense than augmenting a tornado warning system with information on the skyrocketing national debt. Mushy metaphors do little to change the world.
Perhaps the clock's maintainers sought to fend off irrelevance; no one pays attention to nuclear weapons as a threat in the West (barring occasional North Korea flare-ups). If that is the case, however, I fear that this has only made things worse.
Warren Buffet, the CEO of Berkshire Hathaway (big player in the insurance and re-insurance business) discussed some of these scary tail risks in his letter to shareholders in 2015
>There is, however, one clear, present and enduring danger to Berkshire against which Charlie and I are powerless. That threat to Berkshire is also the major threat our citizenry faces: a “successful” (as defined by the aggressor) cyber, biological, nuclear or chemical attack on the United States. That is a risk Berkshire shares with all of American business.
>The probability of such mass destruction in any given year is likely very small. It’s been more than 70 years since I delivered a Washington Post newspaper headlining the fact that the United States had dropped the first atomic bomb. Subsequently, we’ve had a few close calls but avoided catastrophic destruction. We can thank our government – and luck! – for this result.
>Nevertheless, what’s a small probability in a short period approaches certainty in the longer run. (If there is only one chance in thirty of an event occurring in a given year, the likelihood of it occurring at least once in a century is 96.6%.) The added bad news is that there will forever be people and organizations and perhaps even nations that would like to inflict maximum damage on our country. Their means of doing so have increased exponentially during my lifetime. “Innovation” has its dark side.
>There is no way for American corporations or their investors to shed this risk. If an event occurs in the U.S.that leads to mass devastation, the value of all equity investments will almost certainly be decimated.
>No one knows what “the day after” will look like. I think, however, that Einstein’s 1949 appraisal remain sapt: “I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”
It's even worse. The second Borel–Cantelli lemma shows that if the marginal risk of an event (per time unit) doesn't decrease to zero at a fast enough rate, there's absolute certainty it will occur. (strictly speaking, an infinite number of times in an infinite sequence).
Sort of. The result is even stronger though. For one, the probability of the event can be tending to zero. So the thing you are multiplying together (in the negative case) gets closer and closer to one. For another, it states that not only is the event certain to occur, it will occur infinite times. In other words (and frighteningly!), no matter far out you go along the timeline of diminishing probabilities, if the rate of diminishment isn't high enough, infinite occurrences still await you.
It's funny how 'cyber' is listed up there with nuclear, biological and chemical attacks, while I understand that Buffet might not be well versed in technology, I think it's vital that the people running the government be educated on the real cyber threat and what it entails.
That's not exactly what Buffett means when he says "invest in things you understand". What he means is: what will the market in which this company is selling look like in 10-20 years? Can you be very specific about that? Can you give me an invariant that will very likely stay true for that period? If you can't then you don't understand the future of this company. And this does not mean that the future of the company will be bad, it may be excellent. Just that you specifically don't really know that.
This plays well with his love for almost trivially easy businesses, like Coca Cola. The simpler it is the easier it is to predict. "You want a business than can be run by an idiot, because one eventually will".
Buffett has a good understanding of trade relationships between the countries, he wrote a good piece on the US trade imbalance many years ago. He probably has an excellent understanding of the bond market. But he can't predict where will this go, so he doesn't use it as a basis for his investment decisions.
Computers control the nukes and chemicals, so yes it definitely deserves to be up there. We forget that you can do alot more damage than a mere cryptolocker if your motivations aren't purely financial.
What I always find darkly amusing is that the word "decimate" now means "absolute catastrophe", when the original Roman term only meant a 10% loss (eg, squads of 10 drew sticks, the one short stick was the victim).
But Buffet is clearly not talking about a 10% loss, in the event of a major nuclear engagement -- that would be a wildly optimistic read. We're clearly talking somewhere between 50% - 95% - total shutdown of equity markets.
Not saying anyone is using words wrong, just funny how language drifts.
> We can thank our government – and luck! – for this result.
A wild statement, considering the US has one of the largest nuclear arsenals in the world, and has recently pursued an even more aggressive policy of nuclear armament and renewal of an arms race with Russia, including withdrawal from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty under Trump. Buffet wrote this prior to Trump's election, but the story would to be familiar to him, recalling Regan's dangerous games of nuclear posturing against Russia in the 80s. The current nuclear threat (which incidentally, extends beyond US corporate interests) is as real as ever, and the known record of close calls is a sobering read[1]. That's just to mention the close calls that we know about. In this sense the US goverment has been and remains an aggressor against its own people and the rest of the world, by continuing to pursue its hubristic and irresponsible policies.
> There is no way for American corporations or their investors to shed this risk.
Options to mitigate the nuclear risk abound for US corporations: for a start, they could use their enormous wealth and political influence to lobby their government to engage in diplomacy with other nuclear armed states, rather than continuing to pursue their current suicidal path. More broadly, US corporations could remove support for Republican candidates, whose party in power has continued to amplify the danger through various policies and actions. Another major avenue is financial: divestment from the military industrial complex, which is instrumental to the threat of nuclear war in obvious ways.
How, pray tell? Give a solid statement, rather than making vague pronouncements and leaving the reader to fill in the blanks of your reasoning. Example: "Climate change is as much of a threat to human inhabitability of Earth as nuclear weapons, simply on a slower scale."
Very good way of phrasing it. I surmise this is also a big part of the reason why there isn't as much of a mass panic as the spectre of nuclear apocalypse has caused.
A nuclear war is a much more concentrated and immediate event. It could start at the press of a button and be over in days/weeks (in terms of immediate damage). There is something visceral and terrifying about it's rapidity.
A climate catastrophe is fundamentally slower, and even if the damage would be far greater, it feels less of a threat (very subjectively). It's easier to handwave it away. "People will think of something" is easier to say when a process happens over decades than when it happens in days.
One can conveniently live in the phantasy that "I'll be climate conscious from tomorrow/next week/next year" for the time being, because the effects are still not terrible (for the 1st world).
2 minutes is the maximal value ever. While there are definitely more risks than just after the end of the cold war, I don't believe it's worse than during the cold war itself. Seems inflated, which is a shame.
Agreed. It's a useless metric. It's like the "terrorism threat" color code crap. It'll never come down to a low setting because at the end of the day it's a propaganda tool to make people think a certain way (feel scared, in both cases). Setting it low is the same as turning it off and saying there's nothing to worry about which is totally counter to the goals of the people publishing these indicators.
I know I'm going to get down-voted because being scared of nuclear annihilation is kind of a point of virtue around here but if you take the emotion out of it it becomes pretty clear that the doomsday clock, or any other indicator that acts in a similar manner is nothing more than a propaganda tool. It may be propaganda for something you like but it's still propaganda.
Propaganda is a neutral term. Gaining collective attention for something which is both true and important is as much propaganda as pushing lies in order to subdue people.
Yes you will be downvoted heavily for not being a status quo warrior and thinking outside of the box. I will be too. Hacker News generally dislikes any ideas or commentary that sits outside of their media manufactured overton window.
>Such a perfect democracy constructs its own inconceivable foe, terrorism. Its wish is to be judged by its enemies rather than by its results. The story of terrorism is written by the state and it is therefore highly instructive. The spectating populations must certainly never know everything about terrorism, but they must always know enough to convince them that, compared with terrorism, everything else seems rather acceptable, or in any case more rational and democratic.
To be fair I don't think it's just a propaganda tool - I think in the case of the terrorism threat levels at least they're ultimately used for justifying higher levels of funding.
Compare it to working in an office - it's almost in your interests to convince others that you're very busy to avoid having more workload.
We have been very close to the edge over the past few decades (see the Petrov story circa 1983) but there was one mitigating feature: at least nuclear launch control was held by a relatively small number of mostly politically stable actors. This situation didn’t exist by accident: it was maintained deliberately by the world’s various powers, typically at great cost. The rise of NK as a nuclear power isn’t a global threat all by itself, but it represents the unraveling of seventy-odd year’s of that status quo. If NK gets and keeps its nukes while participating in the global community, why not Iran? And if Iran succeeds, why not the next dozen countries, all of whom see some offensive or defensive value in holding them. For example: Japan and South Korea if either one determines we aren’t going to protect them from NK. And once nuclear capability spreads to dozens of countries, all entangled in various alliances and with varying degrees of stability, the probability of a launch followed by a chain reaction get much higher.
ps: Ukraine gave away their nukes for a promise of security with the budapest memorandum ca 1995. I suspect this has a high effect on any future promises by the nuclear backed countries.
In 2013 (and before) the EU managed to convince the Ukraine that if it signed an association agreement it would be supported both economically and politically and no nasty Russians would do anything nasty.
As soon as the reality of what the EU was willing to put on the table was crystallised in black and white it became obvious that there was no way on earth that this would fly. This precipitated the unwinding of the Ukrainian polity and the unholy mess that they have to deal with now. The EU has been singularly absent from attempting to resolve or manage this situation because they have no way to deal with the Russians, and the Russians know it.
The Budapest Memorandum does, in fact, have a lot to do with the EU because it has a border with The Ukraine.
At some point in the near future it is going to become really, really, really obvious that the EU in general and Germany in particular is underspending on defence by ~4% of GDP per annum, and has been for 20 years. The bill for this, when the Russians present it (possibly by driving tanks into places where Russian tanks should not be driven) will be much larger than 40% of GDP. Note also, this is not the only massively problematic military border that the EU has; the Mediterranean, Balkans and Aegean are all available for geopolitical lunacy on demand in the near future.
I’m happy to defer to your knowledge of military topics, but that still doesn’t sound like a reason to blame specially the EU — an organisation which doesn’t have its own military, and whose members mutual defence arrangement explicitly comes second to any NATO obligations that member states might have.
Blame the UK or the USA for not holding Russia to the agreement, if you like, but blaming the EU makes a bit less sense than blaming the OSCE.
The USA wasn't holding talks to draw the Ukraine closer into its sphere of influence. The UK was involved, and I agree - as a part of the EU it deserves a dollop of blame for the resulting mess.
I think there are two (but kind of four) sides: US/EU vs. Russia/China. The EU is following the US because of its culture that it can relate to more. But it neither trust or likes the US; nor is happy with the US enemy being on its own border. China is following Russia because they have a better military. Russia probably doesn't trust China; not a single bit. But their economy is garbage and they'll need financial help to build more war toys.
The rest of the world is fragmented and not quite unified. I see the rest of the countries as trying to manage their internal problems while staying off the radar as much as practically possible; and they'll bow down to the leader whoever it is right now. (See FATCA and the current Chinese expansion in Africa).
I haven't thought much about this, to be honest, but I want to argue the opposite.
When considering the risks of nuclear war, there are (I would say) three principle risks:
1. An intentional first strike by an actor who is non-rational. (E.g., a believer in an apocalyptic ideology who does not respond to traditional deterrence.)
2. An intentional first strike by an actor who believes they can reduce or eliminate their target's second-strike capability (or for whom a nuclear first strike is otherwise a rational response).
I think one can easily argue that two of the three are more likely since the end of the Cold War!
Risk #1 is rather obvious: the rise of international terrorism combined with an increase in the number of (domestically) weak state actors who have nuclear capabilities--post-Soviet Russia, Pakistan--makes the risk of nuclear attack (via stolen weapons) by non-state actors credible.
Risk #2 is the one people normally think of, and, on a large scale--between traditional nuclear powers--it is probably lower than during the Cold War. I would consider two points here, however: first, this might never have been the principle risk during the Cold War (insofar as, with rational actors and full information, deterrence is effective), and second, there are multiple regional powers (again, the usual suspects: North Korea, Pakistan and India) for whom a first strike might be somewhat more tempting.
Risk #3 is also arguably worse. While the total size of deployed unclear arsenals has declined, the number of nuclear states has increased, increasing the odds on a C&C failure for any given nuclear state.
Interestingly, the significant point among all three observations boils down to "nuclear arms proliferation", which, well, duh--that increases the opportunity for mistaken or miscalculated use of nuclear weapons.
More interestingly, the US considering a withdrawal from the Open Skies Treaty goes to another point: information access. As I noted above, deterrence seems to work with rational actors who have perfect information--by reducing access to information, we increase risks.
I think it is important to differentiate between atomic bombs and hydrogen bombs which are orders of magnitude more powerful. My understanding is that most of the proliferation has been in atomic rather than hydrogen bombs.
I think that a terrorist attack with a nuclear weapon would be less likely to trigger a world ending counter attack since there is no state to target.
Therefore, I think it's possible that while the chances of a nuclear attack have gone up, the chances of nuclear Armageddon have gone down.
However, I am definitely not an expert so I may be mistaken.
North Korea tested a h bomb. You can be sure India has h bombs too, the common wisdom is that Pakistan doesn't. Yet. If Iran gets nukes expect Pakistan to upgrade at pace.
> My understanding is that most of the proliferation has been in atomic rather than hydrogen bombs.
I think it's actually the opposite. The US stockpile consists of mostly (entirely?) thermonuclear weapons. They're smaller for a given yield, and are therefore much easier to deliver. Most of them are also variable-yield, so you can still use a hydrogen bomb to make a smaller boom if that fits your strategic goals.
Edit: it looks like this is the case for the other superpowers as well. The only nuclear state for which this may not be the case is Pakistan, although it's possible that they have a boosted weapon of some sort.
I think there may still be merit to the op’s case that we should distinguish between the risk of a nuclear attack and the risk of a nuclear exchange (or, “nuclear Armageddon”).
Some of the scenarios I outlined—rogue non-state actors, regional wars—may lead to isolated nuclear attacks but not full exchanges. I’m not sure if the hydrogen bomb distinction is relevant here.
(Yes, afaik what you say is true, but I think this is sort of a red herring.)
There are now more actors with nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them. Did you know that India has built two ssbns? (nuclear subs armed with balistic nuclear tipped missiles). North Korea has h bombs and ibcms, Pakistan has a bunch of fission bombs.
Worse who would disagree with the premise that the governance of nuclear armed states has deteriorated? China has a president for life, Russia wishes its president for life would live forever - because God alone knows what will crawl out and take over when putin goes (and if you think the Russians should be worried, the Germans should be hysterical about this but aren't which scares me much) and trump and brexit are bad signs too.
Also people seem to low ball the effect of a nuclear conflict or the media on a regular basis. Make no mistake, we are half an hour from 300m deaths. And that will be just the down payment.
edited - I meant to type fission but typed fussion.
We’re living in a very dangerous time where the threat of nuclear war or a horrific accident is very much still with us, but public awareness of this issue is very low. The only sane solution is to move towards nuclear disarmament. We are playing with fire.
Given that Ukraine, one of the small handful of nuclear states that voluntarily gave up its weapons, likely rues its decision, disarmament is a pipe dream.
Wikipedia says the recent bump to “2 minutes” was taken due to;
> The most recent officially announced setting—2 minutes to midnight—was made in January 2018, which was left unchanged in 2019 due to the twin threats of nuclear weapons and climate change, and the problem of those threats being "exacerbated this past year by the increased use of information warfare to undermine democracy around the world, amplifying risk from these and other threats and putting the future of civilization in extraordinary danger.”
Those same systems which enabled “increased use of information warfare” also enabled the rise of Greta Thunberg from a kid skipping school to the face of a movement speaking at the UN.
I’m pretty sure you can’t have systems which enable the later without enabling the former.
And given the choice between having or not having those systems, I think we are better off with them than without them.
Therefore is it reasonable to conclude that they moved the clock forward based on technological advances which should have actually rolled the clock back?
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 113 ms ] threadI think the top comment still holds, this organization is just acting as a hollow political mouthpiece at this point.
Why is that a bad thing?
The situation is grave, but the Doomsday Clock is a joke.
Folding "climate change" into that makes only slightly more sense than augmenting a tornado warning system with information on the skyrocketing national debt. Mushy metaphors do little to change the world.
Perhaps the clock's maintainers sought to fend off irrelevance; no one pays attention to nuclear weapons as a threat in the West (barring occasional North Korea flare-ups). If that is the case, however, I fear that this has only made things worse.
http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/2015ltr.pdf
>There is, however, one clear, present and enduring danger to Berkshire against which Charlie and I are powerless. That threat to Berkshire is also the major threat our citizenry faces: a “successful” (as defined by the aggressor) cyber, biological, nuclear or chemical attack on the United States. That is a risk Berkshire shares with all of American business.
>The probability of such mass destruction in any given year is likely very small. It’s been more than 70 years since I delivered a Washington Post newspaper headlining the fact that the United States had dropped the first atomic bomb. Subsequently, we’ve had a few close calls but avoided catastrophic destruction. We can thank our government – and luck! – for this result.
>Nevertheless, what’s a small probability in a short period approaches certainty in the longer run. (If there is only one chance in thirty of an event occurring in a given year, the likelihood of it occurring at least once in a century is 96.6%.) The added bad news is that there will forever be people and organizations and perhaps even nations that would like to inflict maximum damage on our country. Their means of doing so have increased exponentially during my lifetime. “Innovation” has its dark side.
>There is no way for American corporations or their investors to shed this risk. If an event occurs in the U.S.that leads to mass devastation, the value of all equity investments will almost certainly be decimated.
>No one knows what “the day after” will look like. I think, however, that Einstein’s 1949 appraisal remain sapt: “I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”
Seems like awfully low hanging fruit to be known as “the second Borel-Cantelli lemma”.
I guess there were some benefits to laying out the groundwork of probability theory in the early 1900s.
This plays well with his love for almost trivially easy businesses, like Coca Cola. The simpler it is the easier it is to predict. "You want a business than can be run by an idiot, because one eventually will".
Buffett has a good understanding of trade relationships between the countries, he wrote a good piece on the US trade imbalance many years ago. He probably has an excellent understanding of the bond market. But he can't predict where will this go, so he doesn't use it as a basis for his investment decisions.
Any links for that? Would like to read it.
Note that this was before the 2008 crisis which did affect the picture. Although it seems US is in a comparable or even worse state, yet again.
But Buffet is clearly not talking about a 10% loss, in the event of a major nuclear engagement -- that would be a wildly optimistic read. We're clearly talking somewhere between 50% - 95% - total shutdown of equity markets.
Not saying anyone is using words wrong, just funny how language drifts.
A wild statement, considering the US has one of the largest nuclear arsenals in the world, and has recently pursued an even more aggressive policy of nuclear armament and renewal of an arms race with Russia, including withdrawal from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty under Trump. Buffet wrote this prior to Trump's election, but the story would to be familiar to him, recalling Regan's dangerous games of nuclear posturing against Russia in the 80s. The current nuclear threat (which incidentally, extends beyond US corporate interests) is as real as ever, and the known record of close calls is a sobering read[1]. That's just to mention the close calls that we know about. In this sense the US goverment has been and remains an aggressor against its own people and the rest of the world, by continuing to pursue its hubristic and irresponsible policies.
> There is no way for American corporations or their investors to shed this risk.
Options to mitigate the nuclear risk abound for US corporations: for a start, they could use their enormous wealth and political influence to lobby their government to engage in diplomacy with other nuclear armed states, rather than continuing to pursue their current suicidal path. More broadly, US corporations could remove support for Republican candidates, whose party in power has continued to amplify the danger through various policies and actions. Another major avenue is financial: divestment from the military industrial complex, which is instrumental to the threat of nuclear war in obvious ways.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_close_calls
There's the problem. They've destroyed the credibility of one of the most powerful symbols of several generations. Running with scissors.
A nuclear war is a much more concentrated and immediate event. It could start at the press of a button and be over in days/weeks (in terms of immediate damage). There is something visceral and terrifying about it's rapidity.
A climate catastrophe is fundamentally slower, and even if the damage would be far greater, it feels less of a threat (very subjectively). It's easier to handwave it away. "People will think of something" is easier to say when a process happens over decades than when it happens in days.
One can conveniently live in the phantasy that "I'll be climate conscious from tomorrow/next week/next year" for the time being, because the effects are still not terrible (for the 1st world).
I know I'm going to get down-voted because being scared of nuclear annihilation is kind of a point of virtue around here but if you take the emotion out of it it becomes pretty clear that the doomsday clock, or any other indicator that acts in a similar manner is nothing more than a propaganda tool. It may be propaganda for something you like but it's still propaganda.
>Such a perfect democracy constructs its own inconceivable foe, terrorism. Its wish is to be judged by its enemies rather than by its results. The story of terrorism is written by the state and it is therefore highly instructive. The spectating populations must certainly never know everything about terrorism, but they must always know enough to convince them that, compared with terrorism, everything else seems rather acceptable, or in any case more rational and democratic.
-Guy DeBord
Compare it to working in an office - it's almost in your interests to convince others that you're very busy to avoid having more workload.
It was signed by Belarus, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, Russia, the USA, and the UK. And signed in a country that only joined the EU a decade later.
As soon as the reality of what the EU was willing to put on the table was crystallised in black and white it became obvious that there was no way on earth that this would fly. This precipitated the unwinding of the Ukrainian polity and the unholy mess that they have to deal with now. The EU has been singularly absent from attempting to resolve or manage this situation because they have no way to deal with the Russians, and the Russians know it.
The Budapest Memorandum does, in fact, have a lot to do with the EU because it has a border with The Ukraine.
At some point in the near future it is going to become really, really, really obvious that the EU in general and Germany in particular is underspending on defence by ~4% of GDP per annum, and has been for 20 years. The bill for this, when the Russians present it (possibly by driving tanks into places where Russian tanks should not be driven) will be much larger than 40% of GDP. Note also, this is not the only massively problematic military border that the EU has; the Mediterranean, Balkans and Aegean are all available for geopolitical lunacy on demand in the near future.
Blame the UK or the USA for not holding Russia to the agreement, if you like, but blaming the EU makes a bit less sense than blaming the OSCE.
And what a mess.
The sooner we realize and accept this, the sooner we can find a way out of it.
The rest of the world is fragmented and not quite unified. I see the rest of the countries as trying to manage their internal problems while staying off the radar as much as practically possible; and they'll bow down to the leader whoever it is right now. (See FATCA and the current Chinese expansion in Africa).
When considering the risks of nuclear war, there are (I would say) three principle risks:
1. An intentional first strike by an actor who is non-rational. (E.g., a believer in an apocalyptic ideology who does not respond to traditional deterrence.)
2. An intentional first strike by an actor who believes they can reduce or eliminate their target's second-strike capability (or for whom a nuclear first strike is otherwise a rational response).
3. An accidental launch due to C&C failures. (E.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Soviet_nuclear_false_alar...)
I think one can easily argue that two of the three are more likely since the end of the Cold War!
Risk #1 is rather obvious: the rise of international terrorism combined with an increase in the number of (domestically) weak state actors who have nuclear capabilities--post-Soviet Russia, Pakistan--makes the risk of nuclear attack (via stolen weapons) by non-state actors credible.
Risk #2 is the one people normally think of, and, on a large scale--between traditional nuclear powers--it is probably lower than during the Cold War. I would consider two points here, however: first, this might never have been the principle risk during the Cold War (insofar as, with rational actors and full information, deterrence is effective), and second, there are multiple regional powers (again, the usual suspects: North Korea, Pakistan and India) for whom a first strike might be somewhat more tempting.
Risk #3 is also arguably worse. While the total size of deployed unclear arsenals has declined, the number of nuclear states has increased, increasing the odds on a C&C failure for any given nuclear state.
Interestingly, the significant point among all three observations boils down to "nuclear arms proliferation", which, well, duh--that increases the opportunity for mistaken or miscalculated use of nuclear weapons.
More interestingly, the US considering a withdrawal from the Open Skies Treaty goes to another point: information access. As I noted above, deterrence seems to work with rational actors who have perfect information--by reducing access to information, we increase risks.
I think that a terrorist attack with a nuclear weapon would be less likely to trigger a world ending counter attack since there is no state to target.
Therefore, I think it's possible that while the chances of a nuclear attack have gone up, the chances of nuclear Armageddon have gone down.
However, I am definitely not an expert so I may be mistaken.
I think it's actually the opposite. The US stockpile consists of mostly (entirely?) thermonuclear weapons. They're smaller for a given yield, and are therefore much easier to deliver. Most of them are also variable-yield, so you can still use a hydrogen bomb to make a smaller boom if that fits your strategic goals.
Edit: it looks like this is the case for the other superpowers as well. The only nuclear state for which this may not be the case is Pakistan, although it's possible that they have a boosted weapon of some sort.
Some of the scenarios I outlined—rogue non-state actors, regional wars—may lead to isolated nuclear attacks but not full exchanges. I’m not sure if the hydrogen bomb distinction is relevant here.
(Yes, afaik what you say is true, but I think this is sort of a red herring.)
Worse who would disagree with the premise that the governance of nuclear armed states has deteriorated? China has a president for life, Russia wishes its president for life would live forever - because God alone knows what will crawl out and take over when putin goes (and if you think the Russians should be worried, the Germans should be hysterical about this but aren't which scares me much) and trump and brexit are bad signs too.
Also people seem to low ball the effect of a nuclear conflict or the media on a regular basis. Make no mistake, we are half an hour from 300m deaths. And that will be just the down payment.
edited - I meant to type fission but typed fussion.
> The most recent officially announced setting—2 minutes to midnight—was made in January 2018, which was left unchanged in 2019 due to the twin threats of nuclear weapons and climate change, and the problem of those threats being "exacerbated this past year by the increased use of information warfare to undermine democracy around the world, amplifying risk from these and other threats and putting the future of civilization in extraordinary danger.”
Those same systems which enabled “increased use of information warfare” also enabled the rise of Greta Thunberg from a kid skipping school to the face of a movement speaking at the UN.
I’m pretty sure you can’t have systems which enable the later without enabling the former.
And given the choice between having or not having those systems, I think we are better off with them than without them.
Therefore is it reasonable to conclude that they moved the clock forward based on technological advances which should have actually rolled the clock back?