How to evaluate the risk of nuclear war – By Seth Baum (BBC News) / March 10, 2022
How do researchers gauge the probability and severity of nuclear war? Catastrophic risk expert Seth Baum explains.
One day last week, I woke up in the morning and looked out the window to see the Sun was shining. My neighbourhood in the New York City area was calm and normal. “OK good,” I said to myself, “we made it through the night without a nuclear war.” I work for the Global Catastrophic Risk Institute, a US-based think tank, where it’s my job to think about humanity’s gravest future threats. It’s rare, however, that I have gone to sleep wondering whether the very next day will bring an exchange of nuclear weapons.
In the first few days of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the conflict was escalating so fast that it could have conceivably gone all the way to nuclear war. My country, the United States, supports Ukraine, making it a potential target of a Russian nuclear attack. Fortunately, that hasn’t happened.
Whether the invasion of Ukraine or any other event will result in nuclear war raises desperately important questions. For the individual: should I take shelter somewhere relatively safe? For human society: should global food production systems prepare for nuclear winter? In the worst-case scenario, a nuclear war may cause the collapse of global civilisation, potentially resulting in massive harm into the distant future. However, whether an event will result in nuclear war is deeply uncertain, as are the consequences. Reconciling this tension between the importance of evaluating nuclear war risk and the difficulty of doing so is a primary focus of my research. So, how do we approach these uncertainties, and what can it tell us about how to interpret present-day events?
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