Thanks for the reply and link to the study—I feel quite surprised by how minor the effect of impact awareness is but I suppose nuclear war feels quite salient for most people. I wonder if this could be some kind of metric used for evaluating the baseline awareness of a danger (ie. I would be very interested to see the same study applied to pandemics, AI, animals etc)
Re. The effects on government decision making, I think I agree intuitively that governments are sufficiently scope insensitive (and self interested in nuclear war circumstances?) that it would not make a big difference necessarily to their own view.
However, it seems plausible to me that a global meme of “any large-scale nuclear war might kill billions globally” might mean that there is far greater pressure from third party states to avoid a full nuclear exchange. I might try thinking more about this and write something up, but it does seem like having that situation could make a country far less likely to use them.
Obviously nuclear exchanges are not ideal for third parties even with no climate effect, and I feel unsure how much of a difference this might make. It also doesn’t seem like the meme is currently sufficiently strong as to affect government stances on nuclear war, although that is a reasonably uninformed perspective.
I feel quite surprised by how minor the effect of impact awareness is but I suppose nuclear war feels quite salient for most people
It is worth having in mind that the intervention was only 1 min, so it is quite low cost, and even a small effect size can result in high cost-effectiveness.
However, it seems plausible to me that a global meme of “any large-scale nuclear war might kill billions globally” might mean that there is far greater pressure from third party states to avoid a full nuclear exchange.
Right, to be honest, that sounds plausible to me too (although I would rather live in the world where nuclear winter was not a thing!). The countries with nuclear weapons “only” have 55.6 % of global GDP[1], so third parties should still exerce some reasonable influence even if it may be limited by alliances. In that case, finding out nuclear war had negligible climatic effects would counterfactually increase, in the sense of continuing to fail to decrease, the expected damage of nuclear war.
Another important dynamic is the different climatic impacts across countries. Here are the results from Fig. 4 of Xia 2022 for the 27 Tg scenario (closest to the 30 Tg expected by Luísa):
The climatic effects are smaller in the US than in China and Russia. So the US may have a military incentive to hide that nuclear winter is real, while secretely preparing for it, such that China and Russia are caught unprepared in case of a nuclear war. Tricky...
In general, I still abide by principles like:
Having less weapons of mass destruction (e.g. nuclear weapons) is almost always good.
Governments being honest with their citizens (e.g. about nuclear winter) is almost always good.
From The World Bank, the countries with nuclear weapons except for North Korea had a combined GDP in 2022 of 55.8 T$ (25.46 T$ from the US, 17.96 T$ from China, 3.39 T$ from India, 3.07 T$ from the UK, 2.78 T$ from France, 2.24 T$ from Russia, 0.52203 T$ from Israel, and 0.37653 T$ from Pakistan), and the global GDP was 100.56 T$.
Thanks for the reply and link to the study—I feel quite surprised by how minor the effect of impact awareness is but I suppose nuclear war feels quite salient for most people. I wonder if this could be some kind of metric used for evaluating the baseline awareness of a danger (ie. I would be very interested to see the same study applied to pandemics, AI, animals etc)
Re. The effects on government decision making, I think I agree intuitively that governments are sufficiently scope insensitive (and self interested in nuclear war circumstances?) that it would not make a big difference necessarily to their own view.
However, it seems plausible to me that a global meme of “any large-scale nuclear war might kill billions globally” might mean that there is far greater pressure from third party states to avoid a full nuclear exchange. I might try thinking more about this and write something up, but it does seem like having that situation could make a country far less likely to use them.
Obviously nuclear exchanges are not ideal for third parties even with no climate effect, and I feel unsure how much of a difference this might make. It also doesn’t seem like the meme is currently sufficiently strong as to affect government stances on nuclear war, although that is a reasonably uninformed perspective.
You are welcome!
It is worth having in mind that the intervention was only 1 min, so it is quite low cost, and even a small effect size can result in high cost-effectiveness.
Right, to be honest, that sounds plausible to me too (although I would rather live in the world where nuclear winter was not a thing!). The countries with nuclear weapons “only” have 55.6 % of global GDP[1], so third parties should still exerce some reasonable influence even if it may be limited by alliances. In that case, finding out nuclear war had negligible climatic effects would counterfactually increase, in the sense of continuing to fail to decrease, the expected damage of nuclear war.
Another important dynamic is the different climatic impacts across countries. Here are the results from Fig. 4 of Xia 2022 for the 27 Tg scenario (closest to the 30 Tg expected by Luísa):
The climatic effects are smaller in the US than in China and Russia. So the US may have a military incentive to hide that nuclear winter is real, while secretely preparing for it, such that China and Russia are caught unprepared in case of a nuclear war. Tricky...
In general, I still abide by principles like:
Having less weapons of mass destruction (e.g. nuclear weapons) is almost always good.
Governments being honest with their citizens (e.g. about nuclear winter) is almost always good.
From The World Bank, the countries with nuclear weapons except for North Korea had a combined GDP in 2022 of 55.8 T$ (25.46 T$ from the US, 17.96 T$ from China, 3.39 T$ from India, 3.07 T$ from the UK, 2.78 T$ from France, 2.24 T$ from Russia, 0.52203 T$ from Israel, and 0.37653 T$ from Pakistan), and the global GDP was 100.56 T$.