EA - Cruxes for nuclear risk reduction efforts - A proposal by Sarah Weiler

Link to original articleWelcome 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: Cruxes for nuclear risk reduction efforts - A proposal, published by Sarah Weiler on November 16, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.This is my attempt to give an overview of debates and arguments relevant to the question of how to mitigate nuclear risks effectively. I list a number of crucial questions that I think need to be answered by anyone (individual or group) seeking to find their role as a contributor to nuclear risk mitigation efforts. I give a high-level overview of the cruxes in Figure 1:These questions are based on my moderately extensive engagement with the nuclear risk field; they are likely not exhaustive and might well be phrased in a less-than-optimal way — I thus welcome any feedback for how to improve the list found below. I hope that this list can help people (and groups) reflect on the cause of nuclear risk reduction by highlighting relevant considerations and structuring the large amount of thinking that has gone into the topic already. I do not provide definitive answers to the questions listed, but try to outline competing responses to each question and flesh out my own current position on some of them in separate posts/write-ups (linked to below).The post consists of the following sections:Setting the stage: some background on my CERI research projectOutline of my work on nuclear issues prior to the summer fellowshipSummary of work by others with some similarity to mineA defense of the value of my project and the output presented hereMain body: list of cruxes in the nuclear risk debateSubstantive cruxes: questions to determine which nuclear risks to work on and how to do soSub-cruxes: questions to help tackle the cruxes aboveMeta-level cruxes: methodological and epistemological questionsLinks and referencesSetting the stageFor a couple of months, I have been engaged in an effort to disentangle the nuclear risk cause area, i.e., to figure out which specific risks it encompasses and to get a sense for what can and should be done about these risks. I took several stabs at the problem, and this is my latest attempt to make progress on this disentanglement goal.My previous attempts to disentangle nuclear riskWhile I had some exposure to nuclear affairs during my studies of global politics at uni (i.e., at least since 2018) and have been reading about the topic throughout the last few years, I’ve been engaging with the topic more seriously only since the beginning of this year (2022), when I did a part-time research fellowship in which I decided to focus on nuclear risks.For that fellowship, I started by brainstorming my thoughts and uncertainties about nuclear risk as a problem area that I might want to work on (resulting in a list of questions and my preliminary thoughts on them), did a limited survey of the academic literature on different intellectual approaches to the topic of nuclear weapons, and conducted a small-scale empirical investigation into how three different non-profits in the nuclear risk field (the Nuclear Threat Initiative, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, and the RAND Corporation) conceptualize and justify their work on nuclear risk (resulting in a sketch of the theory of change. of each organization, constructed based on the information they provide on their websites).During ten weeks over this summer (Jul-Sep 2022), my participation in the Cambridge Existential Risk Initiative — a full-time, paid and mentored research fellowship — has allowed me to dedicate more time to this project and to test out a few more approaches to understanding the nuclear risk field. I spent around three weeks with the goal of compiling a list of organizations working on nuclear risk issues, collecting information on their self-described theory of change, and categorizing the organizations in a broad typolog...