Summary: With Russia's invasion and Putin's gestures towards using nuclear weapons, we seemed to have passed a threshold where it makes sense to spent at least a couple of days thinking about this. Me and a couple of friends are thinking about what might be reasonable approaches from a personal decision-making perspective and would love your input.
There's a war between Russia and Ukraine and Putin (who has control over the largest amount of nuclear warheads) appears to be threatening with nuclear war if "The West" interferes. Specifically, he says "Whoever tries to hinder us should know that Russia's response will be immediate, and it will lead you to such consequences that you have never encountered in your history" (source).
Additionally, he appears to be paranoid and believes (or at least want his people to believe) that "Western Patriots" will bring weapons of mass destruction to Ukraine and "help it acquire these weapons to create yet another threat to our country.". Given this apparent paranoia, thirst for power, and his actual power, the risk of some form of nuclear attack seems to pass a threshold to think about it for at least one or two days.
From a personal decision-making perspective, it seems reasonable to optimize for personal safety (in the case of nuclear war) and the ability to contribute to the long-term flourishing of our civilization - including this threat.
Concretely, a couple of friends and me are considering changing location away from the UK and mainland Europe in a easily reversible and low cost way (e.g., home office from Morocco) while recurringly reassessing the situation for signals of escalation or de-escalation.
The reasoning behind moving away Europe is due to the likelihood of a first-strike on states with nuclear weapons (UK and France) and the subsequent outbreak of panic with an increased difficulty to leave the country and questionable ability to maintain a robust infrastructure for living (e.g., food supply).
PS. There's also a lot of interesting predictions on metaculus.
What do you think about the reasoning and the tentative personal implications?
Also, do you have any input on how a highly skilled personal and professional coach can contribute to the mitigation of this risk?
Living in New Zealand, there appears to be a near-consensus that it's one of the best places in the world to be in the event of a nuclear war and/or nuclear winter. So from a personal perspective I'm pretty well-optimised.
From an EA perspective, however, I've wondered for a while about the cause area of an "NZ bolthole for x-risks". If New Zealand is indeed likely to come out relatively well in the event of many disasters, then it seems there could be significant value in investments that have high value in some of the more likely scenarios.
This hasn't got much beyond some idle chatter with other EAs, and I'm quite uncertain as to exactly what the highest value investments would be. I think exploratory research at least is warranted.
However, with the Ukraine situation the question (at least with respect to nuclear-risk) has suddenly become a lot more time sensitive. Rigorous research may produce answers too late. What low-cost (>$1,000) actions could we in New Zealand take that would have an outsized impact in the event of a nuclear war in the next 3 months?
Don't buy the stuff about expecting a famine that kills billions at all? Especially since she didn't seem to have dug into the actual criticisms of the nuclear winter theory in her post sequence, e.g. the independent components of the theory. I think very likely (>90%) there won't be any change in temperature at all, which will be the case if any of those components fail. And as I understand it she has since updated towards being less bullish on it since those posts, and people who succeeded her at RP don't think nuclear winter is that likely either.