Nikita Lalwani

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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

Okay.

And what defenses might keep nuclear command control and communications survivable?

Yeah, that just feels really huge to me.

I guess a thing that is striking to me about all of this is both the extent to which it really depends on kind of this like offensive, defensive back and forth between attackers and defenders, and also the extent to which a lot of this rides on how much uncertainty a country is willing to accept in attempting a splendid first strike.

So I want to ask some questions about that.

Yeah, I guess the first one just being, if this kind of survivability ends up depending a bunch on whether rivals invest thoughtfully and sufficiently in adaptation and defense, how confident are you that that will definitely happen?

Yeah, I guess just on this, like, that seems good from the perspective of nuclear deterrence holding.

It seems potentially bad from the perspective of just, like...

arms races seem dangerous.

Is that... Yeah, how worried are you about this?

Yeah, the Cold War wasn't a good time.

Totally.

Okay, and then it seems like another one of the big considerations here is that advanced AI will likely make kind of destroying more of an adversary's missiles very possible.

But it still seems like it's extremely difficult to kind of guarantee success of a 100% Splendid First Strike where you take out all of their missiles and you're confident in advance that you will take out all of their missiles.

So if an adversary has even a few nuclear weapons left and can still kind of communicate with their launchers, like, yes, we want to launch a second strike, that can be enormously costly for the attacking country, even if it isn't like a full scale second strike.

So how close to a splendid first strike could a country get?

I guess both in terms of

Yeah, kind of like percent of arsenal destroyed and also in terms of like being confident enough in advance to being willing to take on this risk.

Yeah, I do find it pretty compelling that a 300 nuclear weapon attack is extremely different to a five weapon nuclear attack.

And if a country could take out 295 missiles with reasonable confidence, and I guess reasonable is still very, very high because of the stakes.

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