A new abnormal: It is still 2 minutes to midnight

It's funny how 'cyber' is listed up there with nuclear, biological and chemical attacks, while I understand that Buffet might not be well versed in technology, I think it's vital that the people running the government be educated on the real cyber threat and what it entails.

It's even worse. The second Borel–Cantelli lemma shows that if the marginal risk of an event (per time unit) doesn't decrease to zero at a fast enough rate, there's absolute certainty it will occur. (strictly speaking, an infinite number of times in an infinite sequence).

> We can thank our government – and luck! – for this result.

A wild statement, considering the US has one of the largest nuclear arsenals in the world, and has recently pursued an even more aggressive policy of nuclear armament and renewal of an arms race with Russia, including withdrawal from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty under Trump. Buffet wrote this prior to Trump's election, but the story would to be familiar to him, recalling Regan's dangerous games of nuclear posturing against Russia in the 80s. The current nuclear threat (which incidentally, extends beyond US corporate interests) is as real as ever, and the known record of close calls is a sobering read[1]. That's just to mention the close calls that we know about. In this sense the US goverment has been and remains an aggressor against its own people and the rest of the world, by continuing to pursue its hubristic and irresponsible policies.

> There is no way for American corporations or their investors to shed this risk.

Options to mitigate the nuclear risk abound for US corporations: for a start, they could use their enormous wealth and political influence to lobby their government to engage in diplomacy with other nuclear armed states, rather than continuing to pursue their current suicidal path. More broadly, US corporations could remove support for Republican candidates, whose party in power has continued to amplify the danger through various policies and actions. Another major avenue is financial: divestment from the military industrial complex, which is instrumental to the threat of nuclear war in obvious ways.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_close_calls

I assume this was his letter from 2016 (?)

What I always find darkly amusing is that the word "decimate" now means "absolute catastrophe", when the original Roman term only meant a 10% loss (eg, squads of 10 drew sticks, the one short stick was the victim).

But Buffet is clearly not talking about a 10% loss, in the event of a major nuclear engagement -- that would be a wildly optimistic read. We're clearly talking somewhere between 50% - 95% - total shutdown of equity markets.

Not saying anyone is using words wrong, just funny how language drifts.

There are now more actors with nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them. Did you know that India has built two ssbns? (nuclear subs armed with balistic nuclear tipped missiles). North Korea has h bombs and ibcms, Pakistan has a bunch of fission bombs.

Worse who would disagree with the premise that the governance of nuclear armed states has deteriorated? China has a president for life, Russia wishes its president for life would live forever - because God alone knows what will crawl out and take over when putin goes (and if you think the Russians should be worried, the Germans should be hysterical about this but aren't which scares me much) and trump and brexit are bad signs too.

Also people seem to low ball the effect of a nuclear conflict or the media on a regular basis. Make no mistake, we are half an hour from 300m deaths. And that will be just the down payment.

edited - I meant to type fission but typed fussion.

I haven't thought much about this, to be honest, but I want to argue the opposite.

When considering the risks of nuclear war, there are (I would say) three principle risks:

1. An intentional first strike by an actor who is non-rational. (E.g., a believer in an apocalyptic ideology who does not respond to traditional deterrence.)

2. An intentional first strike by an actor who believes they can reduce or eliminate their target's second-strike capability (or for whom a nuclear first strike is otherwise a rational response).

3. An accidental launch due to C&C failures. (E.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Soviet_nuclear_false_alar...)

I think one can easily argue that two of the three are more likely since the end of the Cold War!

Risk #1 is rather obvious: the rise of international terrorism combined with an increase in the number of (domestically) weak state actors who have nuclear capabilities--post-Soviet Russia, Pakistan--makes the risk of nuclear attack (via stolen weapons) by non-state actors credible.

Risk #2 is the one people normally think of, and, on a large scale--between traditional nuclear powers--it is probably lower than during the Cold War. I would consider two points here, however: first, this might never have been the principle risk during the Cold War (insofar as, with rational actors and full information, deterrence is effective), and second, there are multiple regional powers (again, the usual suspects: North Korea, Pakistan and India) for whom a first strike might be somewhat more tempting.

Risk #3 is also arguably worse. While the total size of deployed unclear arsenals has declined, the number of nuclear states has increased, increasing the odds on a C&C failure for any given nuclear state.

Interestingly, the significant point among all three observations boils down to "nuclear arms proliferation", which, well, duh--that increases the opportunity for mistaken or miscalculated use of nuclear weapons.

More interestingly, the US considering a withdrawal from the Open Skies Treaty goes to another point: information access. As I noted above, deterrence seems to work with rational actors who have perfect information--by reducing access to information, we increase risks.

Pretty sure we’re actively engaged in a Cold War now. But it is a war of information and finance.

The sooner we realize and accept this, the sooner we can find a way out of it.

We have been very close to the edge over the past few decades (see the Petrov story circa 1983) but there was one mitigating feature: at least nuclear launch control was held by a relatively small number of mostly politically stable actors. This situation didn’t exist by accident: it was maintained deliberately by the world’s various powers, typically at great cost. The rise of NK as a nuclear power isn’t a global threat all by itself, but it represents the unraveling of seventy-odd year’s of that status quo. If NK gets and keeps its nukes while participating in the global community, why not Iran? And if Iran succeeds, why not the next dozen countries, all of whom see some offensive or defensive value in holding them. For example: Japan and South Korea if either one determines we aren’t going to protect them from NK. And once nuclear capability spreads to dozens of countries, all entangled in various alliances and with varying degrees of stability, the probability of a launch followed by a chain reaction get much higher.

Agreed. It's a useless metric. It's like the "terrorism threat" color code crap. It'll never come down to a low setting because at the end of the day it's a propaganda tool to make people think a certain way (feel scared, in both cases). Setting it low is the same as turning it off and saying there's nothing to worry about which is totally counter to the goals of the people publishing these indicators.

I know I'm going to get down-voted because being scared of nuclear annihilation is kind of a point of virtue around here but if you take the emotion out of it it becomes pretty clear that the doomsday clock, or any other indicator that acts in a similar manner is nothing more than a propaganda tool. It may be propaganda for something you like but it's still propaganda.

The Doomsday Clock has always been political rhetoric.

Why is that a bad thing?

Why hollow?

Given that Ukraine, one of the small handful of nuclear states that voluntarily gave up its weapons, likely rues its decision, disarmament is a pipe dream.

I watched, and clearly explains the horrible facts and timeline of what happens.