Sam Harris

I mean, it's not talked about enough, which is that there's so many moments where we have come close to nuclear catastrophe.

And the reason why we haven't has come down to a decision of a single person.

You know, in the case of JFK, it's understandable he's the president of the United States.

He's the person who should be deciding this.

I mean, as crazy as that sounds, I'm not sure we've even thought through the logic and psychology and practicality of having even a president make this decision.

But there are multiple cases where you have a low-level commander on the Soviet side who's deciding whether or not to start a nuclear war on the basis of some information that

The other case was in 1983, where you had a, I think it was a lieutenant colonel, Stanislav Petrov, who got some faulty radar data.

He wasn't in a position to decide whether or not to respond with nuclear weapons, but he was in a position to pass this data up the chain, and it seems very likely that a retaliatory response would have been forthcoming.

But if memory serves, he saw that it looked like, based on the radar, that the U.S.

had launched something like five ICBMs as a first strike.

And he reasoned that there's no way they would just launch five missiles.

If it's going to be a first strike, they would launch hundreds.

So this is probably bad data.

But the idea that we have a system where it is falling to some low-level person to decide whether we are on a grease slide into nuclear Armageddon, it's a crazy situation.

Yeah.

I mean, we'll talk about AI.

There are reasons to be very concerned about taking this out of human hands, but that suggests that the whole thing is totally untenable.

And even the ethics of it, when you think about a retaliation in response to a perceived first strike, that is something I spoke about, I believe, with William Perry when he was on the podcast

I mean, I just I don't think it feels like we haven't thought through the psychology of the moment.

I mean, imagine you're the president of the United States and you have information that your enemy, let's say it's Russia, has just launched a full first strike seeking to destroy American society.