EA - Intermediate goals for reducing risks from nuclear weapons: A shallow review (part 1/4) by MichaelA

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: Intermediate goals for reducing risks from nuclear weapons: A shallow review (part 1/4), published by MichaelA on May 1, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.This is a blog post, not a research report, meaning it was produced relatively quickly and is not to Rethink Priorities' typical standards of substantiveness and careful checking for accuracy.SummaryWhat is this post?This post is the first part of what was intended to be a shallow review of potential “intermediate goals” one could pursue in order to reduce nuclear risk (focusing especially on the contribution of nuclear weapons to existential risk). The full review would’ve broken intermediate goals down into:goals aimed at reducing the odds of nuclear conflict or other non-test nuclear detonationsgoals aimed at changing how nuclear conflict plays out if it does occur (in a way that reduces its harms)goals aimed at improving resilience to or ability to recover from the harms of nuclear conflictgoals that are cross-cutting, focused on field-building, or otherwise have indirect effectsThis first part of the shallow review focuses just on the first of those categories: goals aimed at reducing the odds of nuclear conflict or other non-test nuclear detonations. We tentatively think that, on the margin, this is the least promising of those four categories of goals, but that there are still some promising interventions in this category.Within this category, we review multiple potential goals. For most of those goals, we briefly discuss:What we mean by the goalWhy progress on this goal might reduce or increase nuclear riskExamples of specific interventions or organizations that could advance the goalOur very tentative bottom-line beliefs about:How much progress on the goal would reduce or increase nuclear riskWhat resources are most needed to make progress on the goalHow easy making progress on the goal would beWhat key effects making progress on the goal might have on things other than nuclear riskNote that, due to time constraints, this post is much less comprehensive and thoroughly researched and reviewed than we’d like.The intermediate goals we considered, and our tentative bottom line beliefs on themThis post and table breaks down high-level goals into increasingly granular goals, and shares our current best guesses on the relatively granular goals. Many goals could be pursued for multiple reasons and could hence appear in multiple places in this table, but we generally just showed each goal in the first relevant place anyway. This means in some cases a lot of the benefits of a given goal may be for higher-level goals we haven’t shown it as nested under.We unfortunately did even less research on the goals listed from From 1.1.2.6 onwards than the earlier ones, and the bottom-line views for that later set are mostly Will’s especially tentative personal views.Potential intermediate goalWhat effect would progress on this goal have on nuclear risk?How easy would it be to make progress on this goal?What resources are most needed for progress on this goal?Key effects this goal might have on things other than nuclear risk?1.1.1.1Reduce the odds of armed conflict in generalModerate reduction in riskHardUnsure.1.1.1.2Reduce the odds of (initially non-nuclear) armed conflict, with a focus on those involving at least one nuclear-armed stateMajor reduction in riskHard Similar to “1.1.1.1: Reduce the odds of armed conflict in general”1.1.1.3Reduce proliferationModerate reduction in riskHardMore non-nuclear conflict?Or maybe less?1.1.1.4Promote complete nuclear disarmamentMajor reduction in riskAlmost impossible to fully achieve this unless the world changes radically (e.g., a world government or transformative artificial intelligence is created, or a great power war occurs) 1.1.2.1Promote no first use (N...