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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The Far Future Argument for Confronting Catastrophic Threats to Humanity: Practical Significance and Alternatives

Post Date October 14, 2015
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View the paper “The Far Future Argument for Confronting Catastrophic Threats to Humanity: Practical Significance and Alternatives”

Certain major global catastrophes could cause permanent harm to humanity. A large body of scholarship makes a moral argument for confronting the threat of these catastrophes based on a concern for far future generations. The far future can be defined as anything beyond the next several millennia, including millions or billions of years from now, or even longer. Given the moral principle of caring about everyone equally, including people …

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Introduction: Confronting Future Catastrophic Threats to Humanity

Post Date October 14, 2015
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View the paper “Introduction: Confronting Future Catastrophic Threats to Humanity”

Humanity faces a range of threats to its viability as a civilization and its very survival. These catastrophic threats include natural disasters such as supervolcano eruptions and large asteroid collisions as well as disasters caused by human activity such as nuclear war and global warming. The threats are diverse, but their would-be result is the same: the collapse of global human civilization or even human extinction.

These diverse threats are increasingly studied as one integrated field, using …

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Confronting Future Catastrophic Threats to Humanity

Post Date September 01, 2015
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Confronting future catastrophic threats to humanity is a special issue of the journal Futures co-edited by Bruce Tonn and myself. It contains 11 original articles discussing a range of issues on catastrophic threats. It is part of ongoing attention to catastrophic threats in Futures.

Relative to prior collections, such as the 2008 book Global Catastrophic Risks and the 2009 special issue of Futures Human Extinction, this special issue aims to contribute more of a practical focus to the study of catastrophic threats to humanity, in order to better guide humanity’s …

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