Dear friends,

This month we are announcing a new paper, “A Model for the Impacts of Nuclear War”, co-authored by Tony Barrett and myself. The paper presents a detailed and comprehensive accounting of the many ways that nuclear war can harm human beings and human society. It is a counterpart to the paper we announced last month, “A Model for the Probability of Nuclear War”.

The model has five main branches corresponding to the five main types of impacts of nuclear weapon detonations: thermal radiation, blast, ionizing radiation, electromagnetic pulse, and human perceptions. A major focus of the model is secondary effects on infrastructure, the global economy, and even human psychology, which is important but often overlooked. In addition, the model captures interconnections between the five main branches and connections to other global catastrophic risks including global warming and pandemics. In short, the impacts of nuclear war are numerous and complex; this paper goes a long way to identifying and characterizing them.

You can download the paper here.

Sincerely,
Seth Baum, Executive Director

Conference Talks

GCRI Executive Director Seth Baum is giving a talk titled “Making the most of limited evidence in global catastrophic risk analysis” at the Cambridge Conference on Catastrophic Risk.

Call for Papers

GCRI Associate Roman Yampolskiy is looking for short position papers, longer scientific contributions, and talk/session proposals for the First International Workshop on Artificial Intelligence Safety Engineering (WAISE 2018) in Västerås, Sweden on September 18. Submissions are due May 22.