I disagree with the claim that the overall accident risk is going down. While it's probably true early warning systems are getting more reliable (though the actual degree of this is really hard to gauge due to their complexity)^[1], a third party (China) adopting launch on warning arguably raises the risk at least 50%, if not more due to initial kinks. Also, as many have pointed out, the emerging trilateral dynamic of three nuclear peers is unprecedented in history and less stable.

Also, what would count as an accidental nuclear war? I think e.g. the US launching a large salvo of low-observable cruise missiles deep into the Chinese mainland during a conventional war could easily be mistaken as an attack on the silo fields and trigger a nuclear launch.

Thank you very much for writing this. I broadly agree with your post, but I probably put less weight than you do on the historical record. I think the crux is that I assign a higher probability to there being close calls that we don’t yet know about, but which would make the picture look very different.^[1] Here are a few reasons for thinking this:

• The post says that documents generally get declassified after 25 years, implying that we would hear about them eventually. This is a US rule though – other countries are less transparent, suggesting that we are undercounting their close calls.^[2]
• Even if documents do get declassified, it’s non-trivial to actually identify close calls. In “The Limits of Safety”, Scott Sagan documents several nuclear close calls.^[3] He says that the cases he discovered were probably “just the tip of the iceberg” (p270) – essentially because the archive work to find them was so difficult.^[4]
• It wouldn’t necessarily be obvious to researchers that a given incident was a close call. Nuclear weapons are often thought about in terms of normal accident theory, which posits that complex systems fail in unpredictable ways.
• Out of 10 close calls, 3 relate primarily to the USSR or Russia, 1 relates to both the USSR and the USA, and  6 relate primarily to the USA.^[5] I can imagine that the USA and USSR/Russia would have a disproportionate share of close calls (for example because they have by far the most nuclear weapons). But it would be very surprising to me for the US to have 6 such cases, while the other nuclear weapons states – China, France, Israel, India, North Korea, Pakistan, and the UK – combined  have 0.

1. ^{^}

   This depends upon the claim that the cases that we  know about are not necessarily representative of the entire universe of cases. 

2. ^{^}

   A similar point is made in this report from Chatham House (p3).

3. ^{^}

   Sagan is interested in a broader range of close calls than the one in the post, but from memory I think Sagan was the first researcher to publicly identify the “Missiles over Georgia” and “power outage” cases.

^{^}

Sagan also did interviews with relevant people, and submitted requests under the Freedom of Information Act. These are described in the introduction to Limits of Safety.

^{^}

USSR/Russia: Petrov, Able Archer, Norwegian Rocket. USSR and USA: Cuban Missile Crisis. USA: remaining 6.

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How do you think the push to replace humans with AI systems in nuclear warfare decision making will affect the chance of accidental nuclear war going forward? I hear some countries have been considering it.

> Will a nuclear incident lead to a nuclear exchange?
> If we take rule of succession with a 10% naive prior and update based on surviving ten accidents so far, the chance of the next incident resulting in a nuclear exchange is (1-(10+10)/(10+11)) = 5%.

I'm not sure you can do this, because of anthropic effects (you don't get to observe some words with nuclear exchanges). I would adjust this upwards.

Also, a 10% naïve prior smells a bit high, personally.

“Seven of these events involve computer errors mistaking innocent things for incoming nuclear weapons and three of which involve misinterpreting enemy actions as signaling potential nuclear intention.”

Making safer computer systems for nuclear missile detection and deployment seems like a potentially impactful career goal. I know next to nothing about the topic, but some amateur thoughts here: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/7ZZpWPq5iqkLMmt25/aogara-s-shortform?commentId=rnM3FAHtBpymBsdT7

Great post, good luck with the new blog!