Humanity can be extremely unserious about doom—it is frightening how many gambles were made during the cold war: the US had some breakdown in communication such that they planned to defend Europe with massive nuclear strikes at a point in time where they only had a few nukes that were barely ready, there were many near misses, hierarchies often hid how bad the security of nukes was—resulting in inadequate systems and lost nukes, etc.
It gets worse than this. I’ve been reading through Ellsberg’s recollections about being a nuclear war planner for the Kennedy administration, and its striking just how many people had effectively unilateral launch authority. The idea that the president is the only person that can launch a nuke has never really been true, but it was especially clear back in the 50s and 60s, when we used to routinely delegate that power to commanders in the field. Hell, MacArthur’s plan to win in Korea would have involved nuking the north so severely that it would be impossible for China to send reinforcements, since they’d have to cross through hundreds of miles of irradiated soil.
And this is just in America. Every nuclear state has had (and likely continues to have) its own version of this emergency delegation. What’s to prevent a high ranking Pakistani or North Korean general from taking advantage of the same weaknesses?
My takeaway from this vis-a-vis ASI is that a) having a transparent, distributed chain of command with lots of friction is important, and b) that the fewer of these chains of command have to exist, the better.
It gets worse than this. I’ve been reading through Ellsberg’s recollections about being a nuclear war planner for the Kennedy administration, and its striking just how many people had effectively unilateral launch authority. The idea that the president is the only person that can launch a nuke has never really been true, but it was especially clear back in the 50s and 60s, when we used to routinely delegate that power to commanders in the field. Hell, MacArthur’s plan to win in Korea would have involved nuking the north so severely that it would be impossible for China to send reinforcements, since they’d have to cross through hundreds of miles of irradiated soil.
And this is just in America. Every nuclear state has had (and likely continues to have) its own version of this emergency delegation. What’s to prevent a high ranking Pakistani or North Korean general from taking advantage of the same weaknesses?
My takeaway from this vis-a-vis ASI is that a) having a transparent, distributed chain of command with lots of friction is important, and b) that the fewer of these chains of command have to exist, the better.