The Nonlinear Library EA - New career review: Nuclear weapons safety and security by Benjamin Hilton
May 16, 2024
27:30
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: New career review: Nuclear weapons safety and security, published by Benjamin Hilton on May 16, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum.
Note: this post is a (minorly) edited version of a new 80,000 Hours career review.
In 1995, Jayantha Dhanapala chaired a pivotal conference that led to the indefinite extension of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.
This meant committing 185 nations to never possessing nuclear weapons[1]
Dhanapala's path started at age 17, when - after winning a competition with an essay about his hopes for a more peaceful world - he was flown from Sri Lanka to the US to meet Senator John F. Kennedy. That meeting led to a career in diplomacy (he had previously wanted to be a journalist), during which he focused on keeping the world safe from nuclear threats.
His story shows that with dedication, persistence, and a little luck, it's possible to contribute to reducing the dangers of nuclear weapons and making the world a safer place.
Summary
Nuclear weapons continue to pose an existential threat to humanity. Reducing the risk means getting nuclear countries to improve their actions and preventing proliferation to non-nuclear countries. We'd guess that the highest impact approaches here involve working in government (especially the US government), researching key questions, or working in communications to advocate for changes.
Recommended
If you are well suited to this career, it may be the best way for you to have a social impact.
Thanks to Carl Robichaud and Matthew Gentzel for reviewing this article.
Why working to prevent nuclear conflict is high-impact
The risk of a nuclear conflict continues to haunt the world. We think that the chance of nuclear war per year is around 0.01-2% - large enough to be a substantial global concern.
If a nuclear conflict were to break out, the total consequences are hard to predict, but at the very least, tens of millions of people would be killed. It's possible that a nuclear exchange could cause a nuclear winter, triggering crop failures and widespread food shortages that could potentially kill billions.
Whether a nuclear war could become an existential catastrophe is highly uncertain - but it remains a possibility. What's more, we think it's unclear whether the world after a nuclear conflict would retain what resilience we currently have to other existential risks, such as potentially catastrophic pandemics or risks from currently unknown future technology. If we're hit with a pandemic in the middle of a nuclear winter, it might be the complete end of the human story.
As a result, we think that the risk of nuclear war is one of the world's biggest problems. (Read more in our problem profile on nuclear war.)
Despite this, many of the people with influence in this area, including politicians and national leaders, aren't currently paying much attention to the risks posed by nuclear weapons.
So if you can become one of the several hundred people who actually contribute to decisions that affect the risk of nuclear war, you could have an enormous positive impact with your career.
What goals should we be aiming towards?
Ultimately, decisions around the deployment and use of nuclear weapons are in the hands of the nuclear-armed states: the US, the UK, France, Russia, China, India, Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea.
Most plausible paths to reducing nuclear risk involve changing the actions of these countries and their allies.
So, which actions would be most beneficial to pursue?
Note, we're focusing on the US (and NATO countries) here, because those are the countries most of our readers are well-placed to work in, but we'd expect many of these policies to be useful across the world. (We've written elsewhere about working on policy in an emerging power.)
Overall, after talking to experts in the area, we think there's substantia...
Note: this post is a (minorly) edited version of a new 80,000 Hours career review.
In 1995, Jayantha Dhanapala chaired a pivotal conference that led to the indefinite extension of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.
This meant committing 185 nations to never possessing nuclear weapons[1]
Dhanapala's path started at age 17, when - after winning a competition with an essay about his hopes for a more peaceful world - he was flown from Sri Lanka to the US to meet Senator John F. Kennedy. That meeting led to a career in diplomacy (he had previously wanted to be a journalist), during which he focused on keeping the world safe from nuclear threats.
His story shows that with dedication, persistence, and a little luck, it's possible to contribute to reducing the dangers of nuclear weapons and making the world a safer place.
Summary
Nuclear weapons continue to pose an existential threat to humanity. Reducing the risk means getting nuclear countries to improve their actions and preventing proliferation to non-nuclear countries. We'd guess that the highest impact approaches here involve working in government (especially the US government), researching key questions, or working in communications to advocate for changes.
Recommended
If you are well suited to this career, it may be the best way for you to have a social impact.
Thanks to Carl Robichaud and Matthew Gentzel for reviewing this article.
Why working to prevent nuclear conflict is high-impact
The risk of a nuclear conflict continues to haunt the world. We think that the chance of nuclear war per year is around 0.01-2% - large enough to be a substantial global concern.
If a nuclear conflict were to break out, the total consequences are hard to predict, but at the very least, tens of millions of people would be killed. It's possible that a nuclear exchange could cause a nuclear winter, triggering crop failures and widespread food shortages that could potentially kill billions.
Whether a nuclear war could become an existential catastrophe is highly uncertain - but it remains a possibility. What's more, we think it's unclear whether the world after a nuclear conflict would retain what resilience we currently have to other existential risks, such as potentially catastrophic pandemics or risks from currently unknown future technology. If we're hit with a pandemic in the middle of a nuclear winter, it might be the complete end of the human story.
As a result, we think that the risk of nuclear war is one of the world's biggest problems. (Read more in our problem profile on nuclear war.)
Despite this, many of the people with influence in this area, including politicians and national leaders, aren't currently paying much attention to the risks posed by nuclear weapons.
So if you can become one of the several hundred people who actually contribute to decisions that affect the risk of nuclear war, you could have an enormous positive impact with your career.
What goals should we be aiming towards?
Ultimately, decisions around the deployment and use of nuclear weapons are in the hands of the nuclear-armed states: the US, the UK, France, Russia, China, India, Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea.
Most plausible paths to reducing nuclear risk involve changing the actions of these countries and their allies.
So, which actions would be most beneficial to pursue?
Note, we're focusing on the US (and NATO countries) here, because those are the countries most of our readers are well-placed to work in, but we'd expect many of these policies to be useful across the world. (We've written elsewhere about working on policy in an emerging power.)
Overall, after talking to experts in the area, we think there's substantia...