Von Neumann was, at the time, a strong supporter of “preventive war.” Confident even during World War II that the Russian spy network had obtained many of the details of the atom bomb design, Von Neumann knew that it was only a matter of time before the Soviet Union became a nuclear power. He predicted that were Russia allowed to build a nuclear arsenal, a war against the U.S. would be inevitable. He therefore recommended that the U.S. launch a nuclear strike at Moscow, destroying its enemy and becoming a dominant world power, so as to avoid a more destructive nuclear war later on. “With the Russians it is not a question of whether but of when,” he would say. An oft-quoted remark of his is, “If you say why not bomb them tomorrow, I say why not today? If you say today at 5 o’clock, I say why not one o’clock?”
It seems likely to me that a world in which the U.S. government took von Neumann’s advice would likely be a much darker, bleaker, more violent one. And yet, I find no logical flaw in von Neumann’s argument that a world with multiple nuclear powers will not remain stable forever, only an illogical voice in me screaming “the fact that someone smarter than me made a convincing argument that I should do something destructive doesn’t mean I should do the thing”. Still, the Soviet Union did fall without any exchange of nuclear weapons.
But were we right not to follow von Neumann’s advice? Selfishly I think we were, but again I cannot back this up with logic.
With the background argument: to stop this sort of thing from happening, something needs to have a pretty extreme level of control over what all beings in the universe can do. Something very powerful needs to keep being able to police every uncontrolled replicator outbursts that try to dominate the universe and kill all competitors and fill it with hollow worthless things.
It needs to be powerful, and it needs to stay powerful (relative to any potential uncontrolled grabby hollow replicators.
Hanson correctly observes, that’s a kind of absurd amount of power. And, many ways of attempting to build such an entity would result in some kind of stagnation that prevents a lot of possible interesting, diverse value in the universe.
To which I say, yep, that is why the problem is hard.
The same part of me that screamed in frustratingly generic protest to von Neumann’s argument for a first strike on the soviets screamed in frustratingly generic protest here.
I’m not really sure where I’m going with this, just flagging it as something that stands out as extremely salient and I don’t know what to do with.
It can both be the case that “a world in which the U.S. government took von Neumann’s advice would likely be a much darker, bleaker, more violent one” and that JvN was correct ex ante. In particular, I find it plausible that we’re living in quite a lucky timeline—one in which the Cuban missile crisis and other coinflips landed in our favor.
I don’t have the same reaction to power/control/monitoring being per se very bad. It doesn’t seem comparable to me to pre-emptively nuking your enemy before even trying diplomacy.
Edit: To elaborate on why, part of it might be that I think the default of open competition is incredibly bad and ugly. (Themes being: Dawkins’ “Nature red in tooth and claw” passage about there being no purpose in nature and so much suffering, Moloch, bargaining failures getting worse and worse if you don’t somehow reign things in or dial down the maximizing.)
I also think there’s maybe a bit of a third option? Instead of having one central entity that controls everything, you could have a coalition of agents under the umbrella of peacefulness/cooperation and “not maximizing too hard,” and they together enforce some kind of monitoring and control, but it still has a value-pluralistic and somewhat Democratic feel to it?
Edit: To elaborate on why, part of it might be that I think the default of open competition is incredibly bad and ugly. (Themes being: Dawkins’ “Nature red in tooth and claw” passage about there being no purpose in nature and so much suffering, Moloch, bargaining failures getting worse and worse if you don’t somehow reign things in or dial down the maximizing.)
Something close to this is also my view, and the big reason we avoided it is we are in a regime where wealth grows faster than population, but we have good reasons to expect that in the absence of coordination, we will come back to subsistence living because population will grow as fast or faster than wealth.
More generally, one of my divergences with lots of the “we will muddle through with AI for an indefinitely long period through our current system” is that I think the 18th-21st century conditions are by and large dream-time creations, which will collapse in the absence of coordination post-AI takeover (assuming it does happen).
On @Lukas_Gloor’s democracy point: I think the big divergence here is that I don’t expect enough people to buy into a regime of peacefulness/cooperation absent dictators because identity issues become much more salient relative to material issues, and democracy/non-dictatorial systems rely on people being willing to preserve the system that exists, and most of the reasons why they are preserved is almost certainly a combination of instrumental usefulness that will drastically decline with AI tech, and identity issues being less salient than material issues, which has held up imperfectly through the 20th century.
Identity issues are very, very easy to make existential, and groups of people believing that their group is existentially threatened by democracy will turn to anti-democratic means to save their group (which is already happening), and one of the most consistent trends is as people get wealthier, identity/status matters much more than material/economic issues.
It might be worth getting more explicit about vN’s exact argumentative steps and see if it’s really as ironclad as you think.
Humans have a finite amount of time to occupy the universe. In principle, control systems for nuclear weapons can be engineered to be arbitrarily reliable. The logic of MAD says that nuclear powers will not conduct a nuclear exchange. This line of argument suggests there is no deductive logical reason why nuclear war is inevitable between two nuclear powers. If we have such a war, it may be due to theoretically preventable failures, such as flawed systems. The existence of a possible reason a nuclear exchange might occur without a first strike is far from compelling justification to do one.
In retrospect, sure, MAD worked out for us. But in 1899, Ivan Bloch asserted
… if any attempt were made to demonstrate the inaccuracy of my assertions by putting the matter to a test on a great scale, we should find the inevitable result in a catastrophe which would destroy all existing political organization. Thus, the great war cannot be made, and any attempt to make it would result in suicide.
This was before both world wars. After the first world war but before the second, others made similar arguments. In von Neumann’s time, that argument did not have a good empirical track record, and his work on game theory gave him theoretical reasons not to expect the prediction of peace through MAD to hold. If there was something he was missing in 1948, it is not obvious what.
I notice that I am confused. What did Bloch exactly claim? That the next World War would result in destruction of the entire civilisation? Or a sufficiently capable civilisation would come up with a way to wipe out humanity? If the former, then it is disproven, and if the latter, then mankind didn’t have any doomsday machines before the 1940s. Of course, I do beloeve that Bloch’s words do describe the modern world since an unknown moment after WWII.
Who knows if it would have been better or worse if we preemptively nuked the USSR and all nations attempting to develop nuclear weapons? We might have entered a millenia of absolute peace enforced by imperial rule of a benevolent despot. We might have destroyed the world and eradicated the human race. This type of what-if is unknowable with our current simulation abilities.
We might not have ever had to even use the nukes if we merely made the true threat that we would nuke any country attempting to develop nuclear weapons or caught spying on American nuclear secrets. Japan was willing to take any deal short of absolute surrender to merely avoid fire-bombing. One can imagine that other countries with considerably less Bushido would fold to lesser demands such as “don’t develop your own nukes or spy on America.”
We have never seen a world in which one country had absolute technological and military superiority over all the others. I don’t think with our current level of technology we can tell with a high degree of certainty if the world under US Total Domination would be a better or worse place. I would bet that if the US was more purely despotic and less benevolent it’d at least be better for the average US citizen. Instead of worrying about debt and global trade, the US could have merely demanded other countries export their goods for free to America and focus domestic production mainly on the construction of nukes and nuke delivery systems.
I’d argue that the way force is applied in each of these contexts has very different implications for the openness/rightness/goodness of the future. In von neumann’s time, there was no path to forcibly preventing Russia from acquiring nuclear weapons that did not involve using your own nuclear weapons to destroy an irrecoverable portion of their infrastructure, especially considering the fact that their economy was already blockaded off from potential sanctions.
Raemon is right that you cannot allow the proliferation of superintelligent AIs (because those AIs will allow you to cheaply produce powerful weapons). To stop this from happening ~permanently, you do probably need a single actor or very small coalition of actors to enforce that non-proliferation forever, likely through using their first to ASI position to permanently monopolize it and box out new entrants.
While the existence of this coalition would necessarily reduce the flexibility of the future, it would probably look a lot more like the IAEA and less like a preemptive nuclear holocaust. The only AI capabilities that need to be restricted are those related to weapons development, which means that every other non-coalition actor still gets to grab the upside of most AI applications. Analogously, the U.N security council have been largely successful at preventing nuclear proliferation to other countries by using their collective economic, political, and strategic position, while still allowing beneficial nuclear technology to be widely distributed. You can let the other countries build nuclear power plants, so long as you use your strategic influence to make sure they’re not enrichment facilities.
In practice, I think this (ideally) ends up looking something like the U.S and China agreeing on further non-proliferation of ASI, and then using their collective DSA over everybody else to monopolize the AI supply chain. From there, you can put a bunch of hardware-bound restrictions, mandatory verification/monitoring for data centers, and backdoors into every new AI application to make sure they’re aligned to the current regime. There’s necessarily a lot of concentration of power, but that’s only because it explicitly trades off with the monopoly of violence (ie, you can’t just give more actors more actors access to ASI weapons capabilities for self-determination without losing overall global security, same as with nukes).
I’m currently writing up a series of posts on the strategic implications of AI proliferation, so I’ll have a much more in-depth version of this argument here in a few weeks. I’m also happy to dm/call directly to talk about this in more detail!
Even if Washington had zero compunctions against using nukes (including against cities), it would not have been able to keep Moscow or Beijing from obtaining nukes for long. John Mearsheimer has asserted this explicitly (during a discussion on Iran’s nuclear program, but please don’t ask me to find the web page where I heard it).
Even when the strategic arsenals of the US and the USSR were at their height (in the early 1980s IIRC), there was not enough nukes to completely destroy even all above-ground buildings in a country as large in area as the US or the USSR, let alone buried structures: specifically, even a large 1-megaton nuke can destroy heavily-reinforced above-ground concrete buildings only within a 2-mile radius, and if a person tries to cover the entire area of the USSR with circles that size, he will find that there have never existed enough nukes in the world to cover the entire area. IIRC you cannot even cover it with circles of a radius of 5 miles, inside which it is not possible to destroy even 90% of unreinforced non-wooden structures even with the largest nuke in the US inventory. (A 10-megaton nuke can destroy an area only slightly larger than a 1-megaton nuke, which is why after an initial period of enthusiasm, both the US and the USSR stopped making nukes larger than about 1 megaton, focusing instead on putting multiple nukes on one ICBM.) Note that we haven’t even started to analyze how many nukes it would take to destroy buried structures in the USSR when you don’t know where in the country those buried structures are, and I’ve seen credible reports from about 15 years ago stating that Moscow has a facility built into a mountain of quartz in the southern Urals that Moscow believes can withstand a determined nuclear attack even if the US knows exactly where it is.
The people of most countries will become very determined to fight back after the country is invaded and occupied, which is why much weaker powers like Afghanistan and Vietnam tend to prevail after being invaded and occupied even by great powers. We can expect the same determination after a nuclear attack—and yes, there would have been enough survivors in the USSR to continue the fight. Analysis by the US government in the early 1980s (again when IIRC nuclear stockpiles were at their greatest number) estimated that a full nuclear attack on the USSR would kill only about 55% of the population even if the USSR had no warning of the attack. The number for a full attack on the US was a little lower (50%) because the population of the US is more spread out as opposed to concentrated in cities.
Yes, the people most useful to advancing a Soviet nuclear program would preferentially have been in the 55% that die (especially if Washington attacks mid-week, when fewer of the Soviet upper class would be at their dachas) but Moscow could have used the surviving nuclear scientists to teach new nuclear scientists (and this time required them to live somewhere other the the probable targets of the next US nuclear attack).
The page you link to is silent on whether Von Neumann believed the US would have been able to keep the USSR from obtaining nukes indefinitely or whether the attack he proposed was intended merely to slow their nuclear program down. If the former, I bet no one in the Pentagon took his proposal seriously for more than a few days: the Pentagon would know that to have a realistic chance of keeping the USSR from obtaining nukes indefinitely, the US and its allies would have needed to permanently occupy Moscow and all of the USSR’s ports (after nuking the USSR of course) the success of which would have been in severe doubt, and even if successful would probably have caused the deaths of many millions of men on the US side.
People are arguing that AI “progress” should be allowed to continue because nuclear war is a bigger threat to continued human survival than AI “progress” is, which is wrong, which is why I am reacting against this very widespread notion that nuclear weapons are more destructive than they actually are.
I really don’t see where we go from “prevent USSR from developing nukes” to “completely destroy even all above-ground buildings”. This argument seems like a clear case of moving goalposts. Clearly destroying a large portion of a country’s government, research scientists, and manufacturing base would halt or destroy all progress on nukes even if the large majority of homes remain undestroyed. Also, destroying a country’s military capability would lead to a much easier takeover. In Vietnam the US suffered more to internal politics and poor military policy decisions leading to no clear goal and no victory condition. If we preemptively nuked the USSR and then sent in the troops to hold the ground and slowly convert the Eastern Bloc into a US state that almost certainly would have worked.
Clearly destroying a large portion of a country’s government, research scientists, and manufacturing base would halt or destroy all progress on nukes.
It might have completely halted all progress for a year or 2, but what does the US do then?
People think that if a nation is hit by nukes, it becomes impotent. I think it becomes very determined and unified and is likely to become very determined to acquire nukes so it I use them on the country that attacked them. Again, someone who has spent his career thinking about such things (John Mearsheimer) agrees with me: he spoke specifically of what he thinks would have happened if the US had attacked the USSR at the start of the Cold War when the US arsenal consisted of many bombs, but the USSR had no bombs yet (and then he went on to say that no country or coalition of countries can prevent Iran from acquiring nukes if it is determined to get them).
A nuclear attack would have definitely slowed down the Soviet nuclear program, and one can argue that since the US’s program has not been slowed down, then next attack by the US on the USSR would be even more devastating than the first attack, which in turn increases the advantage enjoyed by the US relative to the USSR so that the third attack is even more devastating, and so on, but that leaves out what I consider the controlling consideration: namely, Moscow would have learned from the first attack with the result that the Soviet nuclear program (which again I admit has been set back at least a few years and possibly 15 or 20 years) can no longer be significantly slowed down by nuclear attacks (because it is now more distributed, with many facilities under ground, with more effort spent to keep the locations secret, and a careful analysis done of what industrial resources the program is likely to need so that similar hardening measures can be applied to the supply chain for those resources) which is why I believe the US would have needed to follow up the first attack with an invasion or occupation (at least of Moscow and the ports) which famously has never been successfully done after the Russian empire acquired territory all the way to the Bering Strait, but then Hitler, Napoleon and Charles XII of Sweden didn’t have nukes to help them with their attempted invasions and occupations of Russia.
And yeah, I think once the Soviet program has been hardened in the way I describe above (i.e., after Moscow has learned from the first American attack) then unless the US can obtain location information from spying, then the American nuclear arsenal cannot be used effectively to stop or even significantly slow down the Soviet program (more than it is already slowed down by the need to keep the program distributed and secret from prying eyes) unless nuclear attacks can destroy most large buildings in the country, which my “mathematics” shows would have been quite impossible.
Apparently Tel Aviv was able this year to get a lot of location information about the Iranian nuclear program (and Iranian missile launchers and air defense facilities) through spying, so it is possible that Washington would have been able to do the same in the USSR. I doubt it, but I hereby mark this part of my arguments as less certain than the other parts.
If we preemptively nuked the USSR and then sent in the troops to hold the ground and slowly convert the Eastern Bloc into a US state that almost certainly would have worked.
Yep. There were countries that didn’t want to be ruled by USSR, and there were republics that didn’t want to be a part of USSR, things would start falling apart if USSR could no longer keep them together by force. One nuke on Moscow, another nuke on Leningrad, and it might be all over.
The original author decided to put the argument in the next paragraphs:
The people of most countries will become very determined to fight back after the country is invaded and occupied, which is why much weaker powers like Afghanistan and Vietnam tend to prevail after being invaded and occupied even by great powers. We can expect the same determination after a nuclear attack—and yes, there would have been enough survivors in the USSR to continue the fight. Analysis by the US government in the early 1980s (again when IIRC nuclear stockpiles were at their greatest number) estimated that a full nuclear attack on the USSR would kill only about 55% of the population even if the USSR had no warning of the attack. The number for a full attack on the US was a little lower (50%) because the population of the US is more spread out as opposed to concentrated in cities.
Yes, the people most useful to advancing a Soviet nuclear program would preferentially have been in the 55% that die (especially if Washington attacks mid-week, when fewer of the Soviet upper class would be at their dachas) but Moscow could have used the surviving nuclear scientists to teach new nuclear scientists (and this time required them to live somewhere other the the probable targets of the next US nuclear attack).
The page you link to is silent on whether Von Neumann believed the US would have been able to keep the USSR from obtaining nukes indefinitely or whether the attack he proposed was intended merely to slow their nuclear program down. If the former, I bet no one in the Pentagon took his proposal seriously for more than a few days: the Pentagon would know that to have a realistic chance of keeping the USSR from obtaining nukes indefinitely, the US and its allies would have needed to permanently occupy Moscow and all of the USSR’s ports (after nuking the USSR of course) the success of which would have been in severe doubt, and even if successful would probably have caused the deaths of many millions of men on the US side.
there have never existed enough nukes in the world to cover the entire area
Except that SOTA understanding of the consequences of a nuclear war between the USA and Russia or the USSR in the 1980s is that the consequences would likely mean that a major part of mankind would die in 2 years, including the entire Northern Hemisphere. And God save Argentina, Australia and other countries in the South Hemisphere if someone decides to nuke Yellowstone out of spite...
We’re discussing whether the US could have stopped the Soviet nuclear program in the late 1940s or early 1950s (to see whether that sheds any light on how practical it is to use military power to stop AI “progress”) so what is the relevance of your comment?
But since we’ve started on this tangent, allow me to point out that most of the public discussion about nuclear war (including by The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists) is wildly wrong because no one had any strong motivation to step into the discussion and correct the misinformation (because no one had a strong motive to advance arguments that there should be a nuclear war) until the last few years, when advocates for AI “progress” starting arguing that AI “progress” should be allowed to continue because an aligned superintelligence is our best chance to avert nuclear war, which in their argument is the real extinction risk—at which time people like me who know that continued AI “progress” is a much more potent extinction risk than nuclear war acquired a strong motive to try to correct misinformation in the public discourse about nuclear war.
John von Neumann famously advocated for a nuclear first strike against the Soviet Union.
It seems likely to me that a world in which the U.S. government took von Neumann’s advice would likely be a much darker, bleaker, more violent one. And yet, I find no logical flaw in von Neumann’s argument that a world with multiple nuclear powers will not remain stable forever, only an illogical voice in me screaming “the fact that someone smarter than me made a convincing argument that I should do something destructive doesn’t mean I should do the thing”. Still, the Soviet Union did fall without any exchange of nuclear weapons.
But were we right not to follow von Neumann’s advice? Selfishly I think we were, but again I cannot back this up with logic.
Anyway, I was reading Raemon’s excellent post Nice-ish, smooth takeoff (with imperfect safeguards) probably kills most “classic humans” in a few decades., and got to this passage
The same part of me that screamed in frustratingly generic protest to von Neumann’s argument for a first strike on the soviets screamed in frustratingly generic protest here.
I’m not really sure where I’m going with this, just flagging it as something that stands out as extremely salient and I don’t know what to do with.
It can both be the case that “a world in which the U.S. government took von Neumann’s advice would likely be a much darker, bleaker, more violent one” and that JvN was correct ex ante. In particular, I find it plausible that we’re living in quite a lucky timeline—one in which the Cuban missile crisis and other coinflips landed in our favor.
I don’t have the same reaction to power/control/monitoring being per se very bad. It doesn’t seem comparable to me to pre-emptively nuking your enemy before even trying diplomacy.
Edit: To elaborate on why, part of it might be that I think the default of open competition is incredibly bad and ugly. (Themes being: Dawkins’ “Nature red in tooth and claw” passage about there being no purpose in nature and so much suffering, Moloch, bargaining failures getting worse and worse if you don’t somehow reign things in or dial down the maximizing.)
I also think there’s maybe a bit of a third option? Instead of having one central entity that controls everything, you could have a coalition of agents under the umbrella of peacefulness/cooperation and “not maximizing too hard,” and they together enforce some kind of monitoring and control, but it still has a value-pluralistic and somewhat Democratic feel to it?
Something close to this is also my view, and the big reason we avoided it is we are in a regime where wealth grows faster than population, but we have good reasons to expect that in the absence of coordination, we will come back to subsistence living because population will grow as fast or faster than wealth.
More generally, one of my divergences with lots of the “we will muddle through with AI for an indefinitely long period through our current system” is that I think the 18th-21st century conditions are by and large dream-time creations, which will collapse in the absence of coordination post-AI takeover (assuming it does happen).
On @Lukas_Gloor’s democracy point: I think the big divergence here is that I don’t expect enough people to buy into a regime of peacefulness/cooperation absent dictators because identity issues become much more salient relative to material issues, and democracy/non-dictatorial systems rely on people being willing to preserve the system that exists, and most of the reasons why they are preserved is almost certainly a combination of instrumental usefulness that will drastically decline with AI tech, and identity issues being less salient than material issues, which has held up imperfectly through the 20th century.
Identity issues are very, very easy to make existential, and groups of people believing that their group is existentially threatened by democracy will turn to anti-democratic means to save their group (which is already happening), and one of the most consistent trends is as people get wealthier, identity/status matters much more than material/economic issues.
It might be worth getting more explicit about vN’s exact argumentative steps and see if it’s really as ironclad as you think.
Humans have a finite amount of time to occupy the universe. In principle, control systems for nuclear weapons can be engineered to be arbitrarily reliable. The logic of MAD says that nuclear powers will not conduct a nuclear exchange. This line of argument suggests there is no deductive logical reason why nuclear war is inevitable between two nuclear powers. If we have such a war, it may be due to theoretically preventable failures, such as flawed systems. The existence of a possible reason a nuclear exchange might occur without a first strike is far from compelling justification to do one.
In retrospect, sure, MAD worked out for us. But in 1899, Ivan Bloch asserted
This was before both world wars. After the first world war but before the second, others made similar arguments. In von Neumann’s time, that argument did not have a good empirical track record, and his work on game theory gave him theoretical reasons not to expect the prediction of peace through MAD to hold. If there was something he was missing in 1948, it is not obvious what.
I notice that I am confused. What did Bloch exactly claim? That the next World War would result in destruction of the entire civilisation? Or a sufficiently capable civilisation would come up with a way to wipe out humanity? If the former, then it is disproven, and if the latter, then mankind didn’t have any doomsday machines before the 1940s. Of course, I do beloeve that Bloch’s words do describe the modern world since an unknown moment after WWII.
Who knows if it would have been better or worse if we preemptively nuked the USSR and all nations attempting to develop nuclear weapons? We might have entered a millenia of absolute peace enforced by imperial rule of a benevolent despot. We might have destroyed the world and eradicated the human race. This type of what-if is unknowable with our current simulation abilities.
We might not have ever had to even use the nukes if we merely made the true threat that we would nuke any country attempting to develop nuclear weapons or caught spying on American nuclear secrets. Japan was willing to take any deal short of absolute surrender to merely avoid fire-bombing. One can imagine that other countries with considerably less Bushido would fold to lesser demands such as “don’t develop your own nukes or spy on America.”
We have never seen a world in which one country had absolute technological and military superiority over all the others. I don’t think with our current level of technology we can tell with a high degree of certainty if the world under US Total Domination would be a better or worse place. I would bet that if the US was more purely despotic and less benevolent it’d at least be better for the average US citizen. Instead of worrying about debt and global trade, the US could have merely demanded other countries export their goods for free to America and focus domestic production mainly on the construction of nukes and nuke delivery systems.
I’d argue that the way force is applied in each of these contexts has very different implications for the openness/rightness/goodness of the future. In von neumann’s time, there was no path to forcibly preventing Russia from acquiring nuclear weapons that did not involve using your own nuclear weapons to destroy an irrecoverable portion of their infrastructure, especially considering the fact that their economy was already blockaded off from potential sanctions.
Raemon is right that you cannot allow the proliferation of superintelligent AIs (because those AIs will allow you to cheaply produce powerful weapons). To stop this from happening ~permanently, you do probably need a single actor or very small coalition of actors to enforce that non-proliferation forever, likely through using their first to ASI position to permanently monopolize it and box out new entrants.
While the existence of this coalition would necessarily reduce the flexibility of the future, it would probably look a lot more like the IAEA and less like a preemptive nuclear holocaust. The only AI capabilities that need to be restricted are those related to weapons development, which means that every other non-coalition actor still gets to grab the upside of most AI applications. Analogously, the U.N security council have been largely successful at preventing nuclear proliferation to other countries by using their collective economic, political, and strategic position, while still allowing beneficial nuclear technology to be widely distributed. You can let the other countries build nuclear power plants, so long as you use your strategic influence to make sure they’re not enrichment facilities.
In practice, I think this (ideally) ends up looking something like the U.S and China agreeing on further non-proliferation of ASI, and then using their collective DSA over everybody else to monopolize the AI supply chain. From there, you can put a bunch of hardware-bound restrictions, mandatory verification/monitoring for data centers, and backdoors into every new AI application to make sure they’re aligned to the current regime. There’s necessarily a lot of concentration of power, but that’s only because it explicitly trades off with the monopoly of violence (ie, you can’t just give more actors more actors access to ASI weapons capabilities for self-determination without losing overall global security, same as with nukes).
I’m currently writing up a series of posts on the strategic implications of AI proliferation, so I’ll have a much more in-depth version of this argument here in a few weeks. I’m also happy to dm/call directly to talk about this in more detail!
Even if Washington had zero compunctions against using nukes (including against cities), it would not have been able to keep Moscow or Beijing from obtaining nukes for long. John Mearsheimer has asserted this explicitly (during a discussion on Iran’s nuclear program, but please don’t ask me to find the web page where I heard it).
Even when the strategic arsenals of the US and the USSR were at their height (in the early 1980s IIRC), there was not enough nukes to completely destroy even all above-ground buildings in a country as large in area as the US or the USSR, let alone buried structures: specifically, even a large 1-megaton nuke can destroy heavily-reinforced above-ground concrete buildings only within a 2-mile radius, and if a person tries to cover the entire area of the USSR with circles that size, he will find that there have never existed enough nukes in the world to cover the entire area. IIRC you cannot even cover it with circles of a radius of 5 miles, inside which it is not possible to destroy even 90% of unreinforced non-wooden structures even with the largest nuke in the US inventory. (A 10-megaton nuke can destroy an area only slightly larger than a 1-megaton nuke, which is why after an initial period of enthusiasm, both the US and the USSR stopped making nukes larger than about 1 megaton, focusing instead on putting multiple nukes on one ICBM.) Note that we haven’t even started to analyze how many nukes it would take to destroy buried structures in the USSR when you don’t know where in the country those buried structures are, and I’ve seen credible reports from about 15 years ago stating that Moscow has a facility built into a mountain of quartz in the southern Urals that Moscow believes can withstand a determined nuclear attack even if the US knows exactly where it is.
The people of most countries will become very determined to fight back after the country is invaded and occupied, which is why much weaker powers like Afghanistan and Vietnam tend to prevail after being invaded and occupied even by great powers. We can expect the same determination after a nuclear attack—and yes, there would have been enough survivors in the USSR to continue the fight. Analysis by the US government in the early 1980s (again when IIRC nuclear stockpiles were at their greatest number) estimated that a full nuclear attack on the USSR would kill only about 55% of the population even if the USSR had no warning of the attack. The number for a full attack on the US was a little lower (50%) because the population of the US is more spread out as opposed to concentrated in cities.
Yes, the people most useful to advancing a Soviet nuclear program would preferentially have been in the 55% that die (especially if Washington attacks mid-week, when fewer of the Soviet upper class would be at their dachas) but Moscow could have used the surviving nuclear scientists to teach new nuclear scientists (and this time required them to live somewhere other the the probable targets of the next US nuclear attack).
The page you link to is silent on whether Von Neumann believed the US would have been able to keep the USSR from obtaining nukes indefinitely or whether the attack he proposed was intended merely to slow their nuclear program down. If the former, I bet no one in the Pentagon took his proposal seriously for more than a few days: the Pentagon would know that to have a realistic chance of keeping the USSR from obtaining nukes indefinitely, the US and its allies would have needed to permanently occupy Moscow and all of the USSR’s ports (after nuking the USSR of course) the success of which would have been in severe doubt, and even if successful would probably have caused the deaths of many millions of men on the US side.
People are arguing that AI “progress” should be allowed to continue because nuclear war is a bigger threat to continued human survival than AI “progress” is, which is wrong, which is why I am reacting against this very widespread notion that nuclear weapons are more destructive than they actually are.
Did you intend to copy-paste the same text twice?
I really don’t see where we go from “prevent USSR from developing nukes” to “completely destroy even all above-ground buildings”. This argument seems like a clear case of moving goalposts. Clearly destroying a large portion of a country’s government, research scientists, and manufacturing base would halt or destroy all progress on nukes even if the large majority of homes remain undestroyed. Also, destroying a country’s military capability would lead to a much easier takeover. In Vietnam the US suffered more to internal politics and poor military policy decisions leading to no clear goal and no victory condition. If we preemptively nuked the USSR and then sent in the troops to hold the ground and slowly convert the Eastern Bloc into a US state that almost certainly would have worked.
It might have completely halted all progress for a year or 2, but what does the US do then?
People think that if a nation is hit by nukes, it becomes impotent. I think it becomes very determined and unified and is likely to become very determined to acquire nukes so it I use them on the country that attacked them. Again, someone who has spent his career thinking about such things (John Mearsheimer) agrees with me: he spoke specifically of what he thinks would have happened if the US had attacked the USSR at the start of the Cold War when the US arsenal consisted of many bombs, but the USSR had no bombs yet (and then he went on to say that no country or coalition of countries can prevent Iran from acquiring nukes if it is determined to get them).
A nuclear attack would have definitely slowed down the Soviet nuclear program, and one can argue that since the US’s program has not been slowed down, then next attack by the US on the USSR would be even more devastating than the first attack, which in turn increases the advantage enjoyed by the US relative to the USSR so that the third attack is even more devastating, and so on, but that leaves out what I consider the controlling consideration: namely, Moscow would have learned from the first attack with the result that the Soviet nuclear program (which again I admit has been set back at least a few years and possibly 15 or 20 years) can no longer be significantly slowed down by nuclear attacks (because it is now more distributed, with many facilities under ground, with more effort spent to keep the locations secret, and a careful analysis done of what industrial resources the program is likely to need so that similar hardening measures can be applied to the supply chain for those resources) which is why I believe the US would have needed to follow up the first attack with an invasion or occupation (at least of Moscow and the ports) which famously has never been successfully done after the Russian empire acquired territory all the way to the Bering Strait, but then Hitler, Napoleon and Charles XII of Sweden didn’t have nukes to help them with their attempted invasions and occupations of Russia.
And yeah, I think once the Soviet program has been hardened in the way I describe above (i.e., after Moscow has learned from the first American attack) then unless the US can obtain location information from spying, then the American nuclear arsenal cannot be used effectively to stop or even significantly slow down the Soviet program (more than it is already slowed down by the need to keep the program distributed and secret from prying eyes) unless nuclear attacks can destroy most large buildings in the country, which my “mathematics” shows would have been quite impossible.
Apparently Tel Aviv was able this year to get a lot of location information about the Iranian nuclear program (and Iranian missile launchers and air defense facilities) through spying, so it is possible that Washington would have been able to do the same in the USSR. I doubt it, but I hereby mark this part of my arguments as less certain than the other parts.
Yep. There were countries that didn’t want to be ruled by USSR, and there were republics that didn’t want to be a part of USSR, things would start falling apart if USSR could no longer keep them together by force. One nuke on Moscow, another nuke on Leningrad, and it might be all over.
I mistakenly pasted in 2 copies (then I modified copy 2). Corrected now.
The original author decided to put the argument in the next paragraphs:
Except that SOTA understanding of the consequences of a nuclear war between the USA and Russia or the USSR in the 1980s is that the consequences would likely mean that a major part of mankind would die in 2 years, including the entire Northern Hemisphere. And God save Argentina, Australia and other countries in the South Hemisphere if someone decides to nuke Yellowstone out of spite...
We’re discussing whether the US could have stopped the Soviet nuclear program in the late 1940s or early 1950s (to see whether that sheds any light on how practical it is to use military power to stop AI “progress”) so what is the relevance of your comment?
But since we’ve started on this tangent, allow me to point out that most of the public discussion about nuclear war (including by The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists) is wildly wrong because no one had any strong motivation to step into the discussion and correct the misinformation (because no one had a strong motive to advance arguments that there should be a nuclear war) until the last few years, when advocates for AI “progress” starting arguing that AI “progress” should be allowed to continue because an aligned superintelligence is our best chance to avert nuclear war, which in their argument is the real extinction risk—at which time people like me who know that continued AI “progress” is a much more potent extinction risk than nuclear war acquired a strong motive to try to correct misinformation in the public discourse about nuclear war.