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?
I'm not super worried. Maybe this is because I am old enough that I grew up with a perception that nuclear war could happen at any time and unexpectedly kill us all. The current threat level feels like a return to the Cold War: something could happen, but MAD still works and Putin, like everyone else, doesn't really have anything to gain from all out nuclear war, but does have something to gain from playing chicken. So we should expect a lot of posturing but probably no real action, except by accident.
In think the largest risk of nuclear weapons comes from the use of tactical nukes being used in the conflict zones. I would expect Putin to use them if he felt desperate enough, especially since he would use them on Ukrainian soil. But presumably no nukes would be deployed on NATO countries or Russia itself since that would trigger all out nuclear retaliation. So most of the nuclear risk probably falls on people literally within Ukraine.
Even if he wants to do that, his power is not absolute. I'd expect/hope for his generals to step in if he tries something like that, perhaps using it as reason for a coup.