Civilisation however, did not end. It seems pretty speculative to classify 20th century history as some sort of “near miss”.
The use of two kiloton yield weapons in a one-sided war in Japan is not exactly the same thing as the use of nearly 100,000 megaton yield weapons in the cold war. In terms of pure explosive yield, the situations differ by a factor of 100,000,000, so I call bullshit on your analogy.
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.
The use of two kiloton yield weapons in a one-sided war in Japan is not exactly the same thing as the use of nearly 100,000 megaton yield weapons in the cold war. In terms of pure explosive yield, the situations differ by a factor of 100,000,000, so I call bullshit on your analogy.
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.