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?
Nuclear winter is a very unlikely, highly conjunctive theory which requires many independent things to ALL happen perfectly, which are already individually suspect. E.g. that cities will all firestorm after being hit by airburst detonations (which itself relies on assumptions like adequate fuel loading per square meter, collapsed structures from the air blast not suffocating the oxygen, etc.), that this will burn in a way producing lots of black carbon, that this carbon will be nearly all lofted into the stratosphere, that this will block a high percentage of sunlight, that the carbon will persist there for many years, that it has to happen during the summer in warmer climates, etc.
Altogether, I think it's unlikely enough a possibility to be ignored in planning, which removes that utility of New Zealand, although it may still have value as a sheltered, unaffected place to escape the chaos and societal collapse of other countries following nuclear war.
I'm not sure if the bolthole idea is referring to an escape for EAs in particular or relocating as many people as possible in general, but the former is something I've considered which I think needs more discussion. Keeping valuable EAs (AI alignment researchers in particular) alive both through the initial exchange and the chaotic period which follows is extremely valuable to improve the world that follows a nuclear conflict, especially to improve the relative trajectories of AI alignment and capabilities by ensuring the built-up base of alignment knowledge & talent is not destroyed.
As such, people should be developing protocols to evacuate those researchers preemptively at times when nuclear war looks likely to ensure they're not killed in the initial detonations (or better yet, permanently relocate them to places with no or much lower risk of nuclear attack in the first place); as well as have preplanned long-term locations where they can ride out fallout and societal collapse/civil violence, stocked with enough food for years etc. I believe it's fine if such locations are in the US given no nuclear winter, and it would be difficult to travel to somewhere like NZ in the post-attack environment anyway.