Also on the topic of nuclear war: I found it very surprising to see that, according to the report, the expected deaths of a US-Russia exchange is lower (3 billion) than US-China or (5.5 billion) or Russia-China (7 billion). This implies that the existential risk from nuclear war is higher from a Russia-China exchange than from a US-Russia exchange. How should we translate these expected deaths to existential risk?
Hi Siebe,
I’m the author of those Guesstimate models — glad to hear you found them interesting! I wanted to flag that the models are still evolving, and there’s a chance the results will change a bit. I’ll be publishing full write-ups of my findings and possible implications for x-risk over the next few months.
But there’s a factor in TSG1 (“total smoke generated by nuclear weapons detonated in China (Tg)”) that I don’t understand, but that factor drives much of the differences in total smoke generated.
I plan to go into detail about this in the reports, but the short answer is that the amount of smoke generated by nuclear detonations depends on a lot on the kinds of targets being hit. Really big, densely populated cities have a lot of flammable material, so bombing a country like China produces much more smoke than bombing the US or Russia. I do think this might have interesting implications for which conflict scenarios should trouble us, but there are a few more factors I’m still building into the models that may end up being more important.
Thanks for the answer. I look forward to seeing your write-up and how the models evolve!
One thing that seems missing in the current model is how smoke maps to famine (does the location of the smoke matter?), but perhaps assuming a linear relationship between amount of smoke and amount of casualties from famine is a good approximation.
Hi Siebe,
I’m the author of those Guesstimate models — glad to hear you found them interesting! I wanted to flag that the models are still evolving, and there’s a chance the results will change a bit. I’ll be publishing full write-ups of my findings and possible implications for x-risk over the next few months.
I plan to go into detail about this in the reports, but the short answer is that the amount of smoke generated by nuclear detonations depends on a lot on the kinds of targets being hit. Really big, densely populated cities have a lot of flammable material, so bombing a country like China produces much more smoke than bombing the US or Russia. I do think this might have interesting implications for which conflict scenarios should trouble us, but there are a few more factors I’m still building into the models that may end up being more important.
Thanks for the answer. I look forward to seeing your write-up and how the models evolve!
One thing that seems missing in the current model is how smoke maps to famine (does the location of the smoke matter?), but perhaps assuming a linear relationship between amount of smoke and amount of casualties from famine is a good approximation.