You are reading it right, and you’re right to be suspicious of these numbers (although it doesn’t seem totally impossible to me, if the wars involved some other extremely deadly weapons).
I think what’s going on is that the numbers are just survey responses from a group of people (admittedly experts). In such circumstances people tend to give numbers which represent their impressions on issues, without necessarily checking for consistency / reflective equilibrium. I’m particularly suspicious of the fact that the ratio between estimated chances of fatalities for the two kinds of conflict doesn’t scale with the number of fatalities.
Ok. This is not too related to this thread, but I wonder how big a risk a US-Russia (or equivalently-sized) nuclear war is in the next century. This article suggests between a 1% per year and 1% per decade risk, based on Martin Hellman’s work. Hellman prefers 1% per year. But a risk that high seems hard to square with how folks are acting now-you would think that if the risk was that high, the wealthiest and smartest folks in the world would avoid living in cities that are vulnerable to being blown up. I don’t think they are avoiding cities. So I am inclined to go with 1% per decade. This is still very uncertain.
2/9-Looks like the experts have spoken and so I raise that to 2% per decade. But it could still be 1% for a “total” war that destroys major cities.
2/13-Here is an even better report that gives about the same odds, but a 6.8% chance of a nuclear conflict anywhere in the world killing more people than in WWII. The highest odds seem to be from countries like Israel, Iran, North Korea, India, and Pakistan, as opposed to the great powers.
You are reading it right, and you’re right to be suspicious of these numbers (although it doesn’t seem totally impossible to me, if the wars involved some other extremely deadly weapons).
I think what’s going on is that the numbers are just survey responses from a group of people (admittedly experts). In such circumstances people tend to give numbers which represent their impressions on issues, without necessarily checking for consistency / reflective equilibrium. I’m particularly suspicious of the fact that the ratio between estimated chances of fatalities for the two kinds of conflict doesn’t scale with the number of fatalities.
Ok. This is not too related to this thread, but I wonder how big a risk a US-Russia (or equivalently-sized) nuclear war is in the next century. This article suggests between a 1% per year and 1% per decade risk, based on Martin Hellman’s work. Hellman prefers 1% per year. But a risk that high seems hard to square with how folks are acting now-you would think that if the risk was that high, the wealthiest and smartest folks in the world would avoid living in cities that are vulnerable to being blown up. I don’t think they are avoiding cities. So I am inclined to go with 1% per decade. This is still very uncertain.
2/9-Looks like the experts have spoken and so I raise that to 2% per decade. But it could still be 1% for a “total” war that destroys major cities.
2/13-Here is an even better report that gives about the same odds, but a 6.8% chance of a nuclear conflict anywhere in the world killing more people than in WWII. The highest odds seem to be from countries like Israel, Iran, North Korea, India, and Pakistan, as opposed to the great powers.