Thanks for writing this—it seems very relevant for thinking about prioritization and more complex X-risk scenarios.
I haven’t engaged enough to have a particular object-level take, but was wondering if you /others had a take on whether we should consider this kind of conclusion somewhat infohazardous? Ie. Should we be making this research public if it at all increases the chance that nuclear war happens?
This feels like a messy thing to engage with, and I suppose it depends on beliefs around honesty and trust in governments to make the right call with fuller information (of course there might be some situations where initating a nuclear war is good).
I think it’s not at all a reasonable place to worry about infohazard, for 2 reasons related to incentives.
First, the decisionmakers in a nuclear conflict are very likely going to die regardless—they are located in large cities or other target areas. Whether or not there is a nuclear winter is irrelevant.
Second, the difference between hundreds of millions dead and billions dead is morally critical, but strategically doesn’t matter—if the US is involved in a large scale nuclear exchange with Russia or China, it’s going to be a disaster for the US, and it doesn’t matter to them whether it also devastates agriculture in Australia and Africa.
On top of this, I think that this is a bad situation to argue for infohazard risk, since hiding the damage or lack thereof of an extant risk is imposing ignorance on an affected group. This wouldn’t be critical if the infohazard creates the risk, but here it does not.
Thanks David that all makes sense. Perhaps my comment was poorly phrased but I didn’t mean to argue for caring about infohazards per se, but was curious for opinions on it as a consideration (mainly poking to build my/others’understanding of the space ). I agree that imposing ignorance on affected groups is bad by default.
Do you think the point I made below in this thread regarding pressure from third party states is important? Your point “it doesn’t matter to them whether it also devastates agriculture in Africa or Australia” doesn’t seem obviously true at least considering indirect effects. Presumably, it would matter a lot to Australia/African countries/most third party states, and they might apply relevant political pressure. It doesn’t seem obvious that this would be strategically irrelevant in most nuclear scenarios.
Even if there is some increased risk, I feel it is a confusing question about how this trades off with being honest/having academic integrity. Perhaps the outside view (in almost all other contexts I can think of, researchers being honest with governments seems good -perhaps the more relevant class is military related research which feels less obvious) dominates here enough to follow the general principles.
I don’t think pressure from third-party states is geostrategically relevant for most near-term decisions, especially because there is tremendous pressure already around the norm against nuclear weapons usage.
I strongly agree that the default should be openness, unless there is a specific reason for concern. And I even more strongly agree that honesty is critical for government and academia—whihc is why I’m much happier with banning research because of publicly acknowledged hazards, and preventing the discovery of information that might pose hazards, rather than lying about risks if they are discovered.
if the US is involved in a large scale nuclear exchange with Russia or China, it’s going to be a disaster for the US, and it doesn’t matter to them whether it also devastates agriculture in Australia and Africa.
Unless the relevant decision makers are scope-sensitive to the point of caring about the indirect deaths in the US, which may be significant if there is a severe nuclear winter? I guess it would not matter, because the direct deaths and destruction would already be super bad!
Nitpick, Australia may have more food depending on the amount of soot ejected into the stratosphere. Table S2 of Xia 2022:
Paul Ingram has done some relevant research about the effects of increasing awareness for the impact of a nuclear war. The study involved 3 k people, half from the US (1.5 k), and half from the UK (1.5 k). The half of the citizens (750 from the US, and 750 from the UK) in the treatment group were shown these infographics for 1 min:
The numbers from the 1st graphic are from Xia 2022, whose 150 Tg scenario (3rd row of the 1st graphic) considers the 4.4 k nuclear detonations studied in Toon 2008. These were the effects on opposition/support for nuclear retalation:
I am not a fan of this way of analysing the results. I believe it would have been better to assign a score to each of the levels of opposition/support (e.g. ranging from −2 for strong opposition to 2 for strong support). Then one could calculate the effect size of the intervention from (“mean score in the treatment group”—“mean score in the control group”)/”standard deviation in the 2 groups”, and report the p-value. Having lots of categories allows one to test many different hypotheses, and then selectively report the statistically significant ones.
In any case, the 1st infographic contains information about both the direct and indirect deaths, so it is not straightforward to interpret whether the increase in opposition to retaliation illustrated just above was due to gaining awareness of the direct deaths from the detonations, or indirect ones from the nuclear winter. The survey asks one question to understand what motivated the change in the level of opposition/support (see Q2 in the last page). One of the potential answers was “Avoid risk of killing civilians in other countries, or triggering global famine” (4), which refers to nuclear winter.
The study does not report the results of the answers to Q2. However, I speculate the difference between the fraction of people answering 4 in the control and treatment group was not statistically significant at a 95 % confidence level (i.e. the p-value was higher than 0.05). In the section “Key findings”, there is a box saying:
All statistics quoted in this section are statistically significant at a 95% confidence level.
The study is called “Public awareness of nuclear winter and implications for escalation control”, so a statistically significant difference in the fraction of people answering 4 would presumably have been reported. I would say that, even without statistical significance, it is generally better to report all results to avoid selection bias.
I do not have any particular expertise in government decision-making. However, I personally think the chance of nuclear war would not increase much if it turned out that the climatic effects of nuclear war were negligible:
In the 150 Tg scenario of Xia 2022, which considers the 4.4 k nuclear detonations studied in Toon 2008, direct fatalities are estimated at 360 million, and the number of people without food at the end of year 2 at 5.08 billion (see Table 1).
My guess is that governments are not sufficiently scope-sensitive to think that 360 million direct deaths in the involved countries (“France, Germany, Japan, United Kingdom, United States, Russia and China”) is much better than that plus 5.08 billion people globally without food 2 years after the nuclear war.
I suppose the chance of nuclear war would still increase, but I guess negligibly. 360 million deaths would be an unprecedently bad catastrophe!
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 writing this—it seems very relevant for thinking about prioritization and more complex X-risk scenarios.
I haven’t engaged enough to have a particular object-level take, but was wondering if you /others had a take on whether we should consider this kind of conclusion somewhat infohazardous? Ie. Should we be making this research public if it at all increases the chance that nuclear war happens?
This feels like a messy thing to engage with, and I suppose it depends on beliefs around honesty and trust in governments to make the right call with fuller information (of course there might be some situations where initating a nuclear war is good).
I think it’s not at all a reasonable place to worry about infohazard, for 2 reasons related to incentives.
First, the decisionmakers in a nuclear conflict are very likely going to die regardless—they are located in large cities or other target areas. Whether or not there is a nuclear winter is irrelevant.
Second, the difference between hundreds of millions dead and billions dead is morally critical, but strategically doesn’t matter—if the US is involved in a large scale nuclear exchange with Russia or China, it’s going to be a disaster for the US, and it doesn’t matter to them whether it also devastates agriculture in Australia and Africa.
On top of this, I think that this is a bad situation to argue for infohazard risk, since hiding the damage or lack thereof of an extant risk is imposing ignorance on an affected group. This wouldn’t be critical if the infohazard creates the risk, but here it does not.
Thanks David that all makes sense. Perhaps my comment was poorly phrased but I didn’t mean to argue for caring about infohazards per se, but was curious for opinions on it as a consideration (mainly poking to build my/others’understanding of the space ). I agree that imposing ignorance on affected groups is bad by default.
Do you think the point I made below in this thread regarding pressure from third party states is important? Your point “it doesn’t matter to them whether it also devastates agriculture in Africa or Australia” doesn’t seem obviously true at least considering indirect effects. Presumably, it would matter a lot to Australia/African countries/most third party states, and they might apply relevant political pressure. It doesn’t seem obvious that this would be strategically irrelevant in most nuclear scenarios.
Even if there is some increased risk, I feel it is a confusing question about how this trades off with being honest/having academic integrity. Perhaps the outside view (in almost all other contexts I can think of, researchers being honest with governments seems good -perhaps the more relevant class is military related research which feels less obvious) dominates here enough to follow the general principles.
I don’t think pressure from third-party states is geostrategically relevant for most near-term decisions, especially because there is tremendous pressure already around the norm against nuclear weapons usage.
I strongly agree that the default should be openness, unless there is a specific reason for concern. And I even more strongly agree that honesty is critical for government and academia—whihc is why I’m much happier with banning research because of publicly acknowledged hazards, and preventing the discovery of information that might pose hazards, rather than lying about risks if they are discovered.
Hi David,
Unless the relevant decision makers are scope-sensitive to the point of caring about the indirect deaths in the US, which may be significant if there is a severe nuclear winter? I guess it would not matter, because the direct deaths and destruction would already be super bad!
Nitpick, Australia may have more food depending on the amount of soot ejected into the stratosphere. Table S2 of Xia 2022:
Thanks for commenting!
Paul Ingram has done some relevant research about the effects of increasing awareness for the impact of a nuclear war. The study involved 3 k people, half from the US (1.5 k), and half from the UK (1.5 k). The half of the citizens (750 from the US, and 750 from the UK) in the treatment group were shown these infographics for 1 min:
The numbers from the 1st graphic are from Xia 2022, whose 150 Tg scenario (3rd row of the 1st graphic) considers the 4.4 k nuclear detonations studied in Toon 2008. These were the effects on opposition/support for nuclear retalation:
I am not a fan of this way of analysing the results. I believe it would have been better to assign a score to each of the levels of opposition/support (e.g. ranging from −2 for strong opposition to 2 for strong support). Then one could calculate the effect size of the intervention from (“mean score in the treatment group”—“mean score in the control group”)/”standard deviation in the 2 groups”, and report the p-value. Having lots of categories allows one to test many different hypotheses, and then selectively report the statistically significant ones.
In any case, the 1st infographic contains information about both the direct and indirect deaths, so it is not straightforward to interpret whether the increase in opposition to retaliation illustrated just above was due to gaining awareness of the direct deaths from the detonations, or indirect ones from the nuclear winter. The survey asks one question to understand what motivated the change in the level of opposition/support (see Q2 in the last page). One of the potential answers was “Avoid risk of killing civilians in other countries, or triggering global famine” (4), which refers to nuclear winter.
The study does not report the results of the answers to Q2. However, I speculate the difference between the fraction of people answering 4 in the control and treatment group was not statistically significant at a 95 % confidence level (i.e. the p-value was higher than 0.05). In the section “Key findings”, there is a box saying:
The study is called “Public awareness of nuclear winter and implications for escalation control”, so a statistically significant difference in the fraction of people answering 4 would presumably have been reported. I would say that, even without statistical significance, it is generally better to report all results to avoid selection bias.
I do not have any particular expertise in government decision-making. However, I personally think the chance of nuclear war would not increase much if it turned out that the climatic effects of nuclear war were negligible:
In the 150 Tg scenario of Xia 2022, which considers the 4.4 k nuclear detonations studied in Toon 2008, direct fatalities are estimated at 360 million, and the number of people without food at the end of year 2 at 5.08 billion (see Table 1).
My guess is that governments are not sufficiently scope-sensitive to think that 360 million direct deaths in the involved countries (“France, Germany, Japan, United Kingdom, United States, Russia and China”) is much better than that plus 5.08 billion people globally without food 2 years after the nuclear war.
I suppose the chance of nuclear war would still increase, but I guess negligibly. 360 million deaths would be an unprecedently bad catastrophe!
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$.