GCR News Summary July 2015

Post Date August 04, 2015
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Arecibo Observatory image courtesy of H. Schweiker/WIYN and NOAO/AURA/NSF

Iran reached an agreement with the P5+1 countries—the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council plus Germany—to limit Iran’s nuclear program. The deal requires Iran to reduce its stockpile of low-enriched uranium by 98% for 15 years. Iran also agreed to cut the number of centrifuges it currently uses to enrich uranium roughly in half and to enrich uranium to no more than 3.7% U-235 (the isotope that powers both nuclear reactors and nuclear weapons). Nuclear …

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FLI Artificial Superintelligence Project

Post Date July 01, 2015
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Category announcement, emerging technologies

I am writing to announce that GCRI has received a grant from the Future of Life Institute, with funding provided by Elon Musk and the Open Philanthropy Project. The official announcement is here and the full list of awardees is here.

GCRI’s project team includes Tony Barrett, Roman Yampolskiy, and myself. Here is the project title and summary:

Evaluation of Safe Development Pathways for Artificial Superintelligence

Some experts believe that computers could eventually become a lot smarter than humans are. They call it artificial superintelligence, or ASI. If …

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June Newsletter: The Winter-Safe Deterrence Controversy

Post Date June 22, 2015
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Dear friends,

The last few months have gone well for GCRI. We have several new papers out, two new student affiliates, and some projects in the works that I hope to announce in an upcoming newsletter. Meanwhile, I’d like to share with you about a little controversy we recently found ourselves in.

The controversy surrounds a new research paper of mine titled Winter-safe deterrence: The risk of nuclear winter and its challenge to deterrence. The essence of winter-safe deterrence is to seek options for deterrence that would …

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GCR News Summary May 2015

Post Date June 01, 2015
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MQ-1 Predator unmanned aircraft image courtesy of the US Air Force/Lt. Col. Leslie Pratt

China has converted some of its long-range missiles to carry multiple warheads. China’s decision to retrofit its missiles with “multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles” (MIRVs) appears to be at least in part a response to the US expanding its missile defense in the Pacific. The US, the UK, France, and Russia already have missiles equipped with MIRVs. The New York Times noted in an editorial that because MIRVs can overwhelm missile defense systems, they increase …

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GCR News Summary March 2015

Post Date April 03, 2015
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EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs Federica Mogherini and Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif in Lausanne image courtesy of the US State Department

Iran and the P5+1 countries—the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany—worked past a March 31 deadline to reach a framework agreement on Iran’s nuclear program. Iran agreed to limit its uranium-enrichment program to producing low-enriched uranium with 6,104 older-generation centrifuges at a single site in Natanz. Iran also agreed to give up 97% of its existing stockpile of enriched uranium and …

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GCR News Summary February 2015

Post Date March 05, 2015
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US Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in Geneva image courtesy of the US Department of State

The Global Challenges Foundation published a report on the risks human civilization faces (GCRI’s Seth Baum and Robert de Neufville contributed content to the report). The report identified 12 different areas of risk “that for all practical purposes can be called infinite”. These are nuclear war, global pandemics, climate change, ecological catastrophe, asteroid impacts, super-volcano eruptions, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, synthetic biology, bad global governance, the …

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GCR News Summary January 2015

Post Date February 02, 2015
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Highly-enriched uranium image courtesy of the US Department of Energy

The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists moved the minute hand of its “Doomsday Clock” two minutes closer to midnight. The symbolic clock is now at three minutes to midnight, indicating that the Bulletin believes the “probability of global catastrophe is very high”:

In 2015, unchecked climate change, global nuclear weapons modernizations, and outsized nuclear weapons arsenals pose extraordinary and undeniable threats to the continued existence of humanity, and world leaders have failed to …

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January Newsletter: Vienna Conference on Nuclear Weapons

Post Date January 11, 2015
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Category media coverage, newsletter

Dear friends,

In December, I had the honor of speaking at the Vienna Conference on the Humanitarian Impact of Nuclear Weapons, hosted by the Austrian Foreign Ministry in the lavish Hofburg Palace. The audience was 1,000 people representing 158 national governments plus leading nuclear weapons NGOs, experts, and members of the media.

My talk “What is the risk of nuclear war?” presented core themes from the risk analysis of nuclear war. I explained that each of us is, on average, more likely to die from nuclear war …

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GCR News Summary November 2014

Post Date December 01, 2014
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Barack Obama and Xi Jinping in Beijing, November 12, 2014 image courtesy of The Whitehouse/Pete Souza

The US and China announced a major agreement to reduce carbon emissions. The US agreed to reduce emissions 26-28% from 2005 levels by 2025, while China pledged that its emissions would peak by 2030. Chinese President Xi Jinping also said that 20% of China’s energy production would be from clean energy sources by that date. At the end of October, the EU had said it would cut …

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GCR News Summary October 2014

Post Date November 04, 2014
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Mars image courtesy of CDC Global under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license

In October, Ebola spread to the US, Spain, and Mali. The US had its first local case when a Liberian man—who may have lied both to airport officials and to health care workers about his contact with an infected person—came down with the disease in Dallas. Two nurses in Dallas contracted the disease after treating the man. A New York doctor also came down with the disease …

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