This is fascinating, especially with details like different survivability of US and Russian SLBMs. My main takeaway is that counterforce is really not that effective, so it remains hard to see why it would be worth engaging in a first strike. I’d be interested to hear if you ever attempt to quantify the risk that cyber, hypersonic, drone and other technologies (appear to) change this, or if this has been attempted by someone already.
Relatedly:
If improvements in technology allowed either country to reliably locate and destroy those targets, they would be able to eliminate the others’ secure second strike, thereby limiting the degree to which a nuclear war could escalate.
Perhaps reading into this too much, but I wondered if you think the development of some kinds of effective counterforce are net positive in expectation from an extinction risk perspective. My amateur impression is that these developments are kind of all bad (most prominently because the ability to destroy weapons seems to force ‘launch on warning’ to be the default, making accidental escalation (from zero) more likely), but I’m potentially generalising too much.
This is fascinating, especially with details like different survivability of US and Russian SLBMs. My main takeaway is that counterforce is really not that effective, so it remains hard to see why it would be worth engaging in a first strike. I’d be interested to hear if you ever attempt to quantify the risk that cyber, hypersonic, drone and other technologies (appear to) change this, or if this has been attempted by someone already.
Relatedly:
Perhaps reading into this too much, but I wondered if you think the development of some kinds of effective counterforce are net positive in expectation from an extinction risk perspective. My amateur impression is that these developments are kind of all bad (most prominently because the ability to destroy weapons seems to force ‘launch on warning’ to be the default, making accidental escalation (from zero) more likely), but I’m potentially generalising too much.