I agree all of these things are possible and expect such capabilities to develop eventually. I also strongly agree with your premise that having more advanced AI can be a big geopolitical advantage, which means arms races are an issue. However, 5-20 years is not very long. It may be enough to have human level AGI, I don’t expect such an AGI will enable feeding an entire country on hydroponics in the event of global nuclear war.
In any case, that’s not even relevant to my point, which is that, while AI does enable nuclear bunkers, defending against ICBMs and hydroponics, in the short term it enables other things a lot more, including things that matter geopolitically. For a country with a large advantage in AI capabilities pursuing geopolitical goals, it seems a bad choice to use nuclear weapons or to take precautions against attack using such weapons and be better off in the aftermath.
Rather, I expect the main geopolitically relevant advantages of AI superiority to be economic and political power, which gives advantage both domestically (ability to organize) as well as for influencing geopolitical rivals. I think resorting to military power (let alone nuclear war) will not be the best use of AI superiority. Economic power would arise from increased productivity due to better coordination, as well as the ability to surveil the population. Political power abroad would arise from the economic power, as well as from collecting data about citizens and using it for predicting their sentiments, as well as propaganda. AI superiority strongly benefits from having meaningful data about the world and other actors, as well as good economy and stable supply chains. These things go out the window in a war. I also expect war to be a lot less politically viable than using the other advantages of AI, which matters.
I disagree with the last two paragraphs. First, global nuclear war implies destruction of civilized society and bunkers can do very little to mitigate this at scale. Global supply chains and especially food production are the important facor. To restructure the food production and transportation of an entire country in the situation after nuclear war, AGI would have to come up with biotechnology bordering on magic from our point of view.
Even if building bunkers was a good idea, it’s questionable if that’s an area where AGI helps a lot compared to many other areas. Same for ICBMs: I don’t see how AGI changes the defensive/offensive calculation much.
To use the opium wars scenario: AGI enables a high degree of social control and influence. My expectation is that one party having a decisive AI advantage (implying also a wealth advantage) in such a situation may not need to use violence at all. Rather, it may be feasible to gain enough political influence to achieve most goals (including auch a mundane goal as making people and government tolerate the trade of drugs).