March Newsletter: Nuclear War Probability

Post Date March 15, 2018
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Dear friends,

This month we are announcing a new paper, “A Model for the Probability of Nuclear War”, co-authored by Robert de Neufville, Tony Barrett, and myself. The paper presents the most detailed accounting of the probability of nuclear war yet available.

The core of the paper is a model covering 14 scenarios for how nuclear war could occur. In 6 scenarios, a state intentionally starts nuclear war. In the other 8, a state mistakenly believes it is under nuclear attack by another state and starts nuclear …

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January Newsletter: Superintelligence & Hawaii False Alarm

Post Date January 29, 2018
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Dear friends,

This month marks the release of Superintelligence, a special issue of the journal Informatica co-edited by GCRI’s Matthijs Maas and Roman Yampolskiy along with Ryan Carey and Nell Watson. It contains an interesting mix of papers on AI risk. One of the papers is “Modeling and Interpreting Expert Disagreement About Artificial Superintelligence”, co-authored by Yampolskiy, Tony Barrett, and myself. This paper applies our ASI-PATH risk model to an ongoing debate between two leading AI risk experts, Nick Bostrom and Ben Goertzel. It shows how risk analysis can capture …

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Wired UK: Apocalypse, Now?

Post Date February 15, 2017
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In its March cover feature on the end of the world, Wired UK wrote about the work the GCRI does—along with the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER), the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence (CFI), the Future of Humanity Institute (FHI), and the Future of Life Institute (FLI)—to mitigate catastrophic risk. In an article on the 10 biggest threats facing civilization, Wired UK discusses the research GCRI does on the risk that an inadvertent nuclear war could cause a nuclear winter and on systemic risk from climate …

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Bulletin of Atomic Scientists: Trump and Global Catastrophic Risk

Post Date December 19, 2016
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GCRI Executive Director Seth Baum has a new article in Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists on what Donald Trump’s election means for global catastrophic risk, which has been covered in Quartz and Elite Daily. Baum writes that the fact that Trump will have the authority to launch nuclear weapons should particularly concern us, given his tendency to behave erratically, Trump’s election also has implications for the prospect of conflict with Russia and China, the stability of the global world order, the survival of democracy in the US, and our …

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August Newsletter: New Director of Communications

Post Date August 09, 2016
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Dear friends,

It is my pleasure to announce that longtime GCRI Associate Robert de Neufville has been promoted to the position of Director of Communications. Robert will oversee GCRI’s website and newsletter, as well as lead a renewed media outreach program. He also joinsTony Barrett, Grant Wilson, and myself on GCRI’s leadership team. Robert’s work is funded through a donation GCRI recently secured from Pattern, an AI company that, like GCRI, has a “geographically decentralized” structure in which workers can live anywhere in the world. We …

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GCR News Summary May 2016

Post Date June 01, 2016
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President Obama and Prime Minister Abe at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial image courtesy of Pete Souza/The White House

President Obama became the first sitting US president to visit Hiroshima, just a little more than one month after Secretary of State John Kerry became the highest ranking US official to visit the city where the US detonated a nuclear weapon at the end of World War II. Obama laid a wreath at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial, but did not apologize for the use of nuclear weapons against Japan. …

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False Alarms, True Dangers? Current and Future Risks of Inadvertent U.S.-Russian Nuclear War

Post Date January 01, 2016
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View the paper “False Alarms, True Dangers? Current and Future Risks of Inadvertent U.S.-Russian Nuclear War”

In the post–Cold War era, it is tempting to see the threat of nuclear war between the United States and Russia as remote: Both nations’ nuclear arsenals have shrunk since their Cold War peaks, and neither nation is actively threatening the other with war. A number of analysts, however, warn of the risk of an inadvertent nuclear conflict between the United States and Russia — that is, a conflict that …

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GCR News Summary November 2015

Post Date December 03, 2015
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Chinese power plant image courtesy of Tobias Brox under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license (the image has been cropped)

Turkish F-16s shot down a Russian Su-24 fighter-bomber near the border between Turkey and Syria. Some reports indicate that the Russian plane’s pilots were shot and possibly killed as they parachuted from their damaged plane. It was the first time a NATO member shot down a Russian military plane since the end of the Cold War. Turkey claimed the Russian plane violated its airspace for five minutes and …

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GCR News Summary October 2015

Post Date November 02, 2015
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Banjarbaru wildfire image courtesy of Amirin

The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists published former US airman John Bordne’s first-hand account of his commanding officer’s refusal to launch nuclear weapons during the Cuban Missile Crisis. On October 28, 1962, Bordne says the secret US missile site in Okinawa where he served received orders to launch missiles at four targets. Bordne said that even though the launch orders were initially confirmed the officer in charge suspected the orders were a mistake both because the US forces were not at DEFCON1 …

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GCR News Summary August 2015

Post Date September 02, 2015
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Korean Demilitarized Zone fence image courtesy of Sangmun Shin/Republic of Korea Ministry of National Defense under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license (image has been cropped)

North and South Korea exchanged artillery fire after two South Korean soldiers were injured by land mines. South Korea claimed North Korea was responsible for placing the mines near a South Korean guard post in the Demilitarized Zone separating the two countries. South Korea responded by using loudspeakers to broadcast propaganda across the border. The Centre for North Korea-US Peace’s Kim Myong-chol, who some …

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