Nikita Lalwani

speaker

191 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Mar 2026 last heard 10 Mar

Nikita Lalwani’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Mar 2026 with 1.

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80,000 Hours Podcast · #238 – Sam Winter-Levy and Nikita Lalwani on how AGI won't end mutually assured destruction (probably) · 10 Mar 2026 podcast

Today, I'm speaking with Nikita Lalwani and Sam Winter-Levy.

Nikita is a lawyer and policymaker.

Previously, she served as director for technology and national security at the White House, where she focused on issues related to U.S.-China technology competition.

And before that, as a senior advisor to the director of the CHIPS program office at the U.S.

Department of Commerce.

Sam is a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where he focuses on the intersection of national security and AI.

They've both just co-authored a really great piece for foreign affairs called The End of Mutual Assured Destruction, What AI Will Mean for Nuclear Deterrence.

Thanks for coming on the podcast, Nikita and Sam.

Thanks so much for having us.

You think AI experts need to pay more attention to nuclear deterrence.

What is the case for that?

Yeah, it seems like a really big deal which way this question goes.

I think there are a bunch of kind of nitty gritty details to get into to really understand the role of nuclear weapons in a world where one country or maybe multiple countries are building AGI.

But to understand those, I want to quickly run through some key concepts.

So nuclear deterrence and mutual assured destruction.

I guess first, can you give just a very quick refresher on what exactly nuclear deterrence is and how it works?

I want to come back to the second strike capability.

First, I guess I'm interested, to what extent does nuclear deterrence actually prevent states from coercing and pressuring their adversaries?

It seems like clearly this is true to some extent, but it also seems like there are big exceptions like North Korea.

What exactly are the kind of limits of deterrence?

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