That hypothetical explosion never happened. Estimates of its probability seem necessarily speculative to me. If you want to “establish that there are actually such things as serious existential risks and major civilization-level catastrophes” then invoking things that never happened seems like rather weak evidence.
I am invoking the near misses in the cold war. But now you have changed your tack from “Civilisation however, did not end” (i.e. the effect of a nuclear war is not an existential disaster) to “Estimates of its probability seem necessarily speculative to me”, which doesn’t really matter. What the probability is is what matters, which you didn’t comment about.
I did—I said your estimate of a “near miss” was “speculative”. In fact, the world didn’t end, and you haven’t presented evidence that that was actually a likely outcome. Calling the “cold war” a “near miss” doesn’t count for very much. We had zero use of nuclear weapons in anger during that era.
That hypothetical explosion never happened. Estimates of its probability seem necessarily speculative to me. If you want to “establish that there are actually such things as serious existential risks and major civilization-level catastrophes” then invoking things that never happened seems like rather weak evidence.
I am invoking the near misses in the cold war. But now you have changed your tack from “Civilisation however, did not end” (i.e. the effect of a nuclear war is not an existential disaster) to “Estimates of its probability seem necessarily speculative to me”, which doesn’t really matter. What the probability is is what matters, which you didn’t comment about.
I did—I said your estimate of a “near miss” was “speculative”. In fact, the world didn’t end, and you haven’t presented evidence that that was actually a likely outcome. Calling the “cold war” a “near miss” doesn’t count for very much. We had zero use of nuclear weapons in anger during that era.