On flash-war risks, I think a key variable is what the actual forcing function is on decision speed and the key outcome you care about is the decision quality.
Fights where escalation is more constrained by decision making speed than weapon speed are where we should expect flash war dynamics. These could include: short-range conflicts, cyber wars, the use of directed energy weapons, influence operations/propaganda battles, etc.
For nuclear conflict, unless some country gets extremely good at stealth, strategic deception, and synchronized mass incapacitation/counterforce, there will still be warning and a delay before impact. The only reasons to respond faster than dictated by the speed of the adversary weapons and delays in your own capacity to act would be if doing so could further reduce attrition, or enable better retaliation… but I don’t see much offensive prospect for that. If the other side is doing a limited strike, then you want to delay escalation/just increase survivability, if the other side is shooting for an incapacitating strike, then their commitment will be absolutely massive and their pre-mobilization high, so retaliation would be your main option left at that point anyway. Either way, you might get bombers off the ground and cue up missile defenses, but for second strike I don’t see that much advantage to speeds faster than those imposed by the attacker, especially given the risk of acting on false alarm. This logic seems to be clearly present in all the near miss cases: there is the incentive to wait for more information from more sensors.
Improving automation in sensing quality, information fusion, and attention rationing would all seem useful for finding false alarms faster. In general it would be interesting to see more attention put into AI-enabled de-escalation, signaling, and false alarm reduction.
I think most of the examples of nuclear risk near misses favor the addition of certain types of autonomy, namely those that increase sensing redundancy and thus contribute to to improving decision quality and expanding the length of the response window. To be concrete:
For the Stanislav example: if the lights never start flashing in the first place because of the lack of radar return (e.g. if the Soviets had more space-based sensors), then there’d be no time window for Stanislav to make a disastrous mistake. The more diverse and high quality sensors you have, and the better feature detection you have, the more accurate a picture you will have and the harder it will be for the other side to trick you.
If during the Cuban missile crisis, the submarine which Arkhipov was on knew that the U.S. was merely dropping signaling charges (not attacking), then there would have been no debate about nuclear attack: the Soviets would have just known they’d been found.
In the training tape false alarm scenario: U.S. ICBMs can wait to respond because weapon arrival is not instant, satellite sensors all refute the false alarm: catastrophe averted. If you get really redundant sensor systems that can autonomously refute false alarms, you don’t get such a threatening alert in the first place, just a warning that something is broken in your overall warning infrastructure: this is exactly what you want.
Full automation of NC3 is basically a decision to attack, and something you’d only want to activate at the end of a decision window where you are confident that you are being attacked.
This is a really good summary. I think the main area I have remaining uncertainty about these types of arguments is around if tech decisively favors finders or not. I believe there’s been a lot of analysis that implies that modern nuclear submarines are essentially not feasible to track and destroy, and there are others that argue AI-enabled modeling and simulation could be applied as a “fog of war” machine to simulate an opponent’s sensor system and optimize concealment of nuclear forces.
Nevertheless, without more detail these sorts of counterarguments seem highly contingent to me: they depend on the state of technology that actually gets deployed, and there may be decisive counter-counter arguments based on other military capabilities.
It would be interesting to see more EAs “grok” these sorts of arguments and to think through corresponding nuclear modernization and arms control strategies that would be implied by trying to assure a desirable long-term future. I’ve tended to think more redundant and accurate arsenals of low-yield weapons like neutron bombs would tend to strengthen deterrence while eliminating most of the risk of nuclear winter and long-term radiation, but it’s easy to imagine there might be better directions yet to ratchet competition and negotiation since that kind of proposal could also be very destabilizing!