Sam Winter-Levy
speaker
361 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2026
last heard 10 Mar
Sam Winter-Levy’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
In a nuclear world, once you have nuclear weapons, the winner of contests and these kind of bargaining dynamics is determined less by the balance of power, like which side has more weapons, a stronger economy, more resources, and more by the balance of nerves.
Which side is more resolved?
Which side is more willing to run a higher risk of nuclear escalation?
Which side cares more about a particular outcome?
I think the AI community
AI experts are really best placed to understand the technologies that are emerging, but they are not expert on nuclear weapons and nuclear deterrence.
And conversely, you know, the nuclear community knows that field of work, but it's just not necessarily entirely on top of the frontier of AI breakthroughs.
Great to be here.
Yeah, so the basic case here is that nuclear deterrence is a key check on the ability of even technologically very powerful states to impose their political preferences on their less technologically advanced adversaries.
And so long as nuclear deterrence remains in place, we think the economic and military advantages produced by AI
while very significant, will not necessarily allow states to kind of completely dominate one another.
States will continue to temper their actions for fear of nuclear reprisal.
And there will remain pretty significant limits on states' ability to impose their political preferences on their kind of major nuclear-armed adversaries.
But conversely, if AI does undermine nuclear deterrence, then the technology really could make a state unrivaled in its capabilities to threaten, coerce, and dominate its adversaries.
So we think this kind of question, whether nuclear deterrence persists or erodes in this age of AI that we're entering, will fundamentally shape both the risks and the stakes of the AI competition.
Yeah, so nuclear deterrence definitely doesn't end the possibility of coercion, intense competition, pressure between states, or even the risk of outright war.
But in the conventional view of nuclear theorists, people like Thomas Schelling and Robert Jervis, nuclear weapons change the nature of these competitions between states.
In a nuclear world, once you have nuclear weapons, the winner of contests and these kind of bargaining dynamics is determined less by the balance of power,
like which side has more weapons, a stronger economy, more resources, and more by the balance of nerves, which means basically the idea of which side has more resolve, which side is more willing to run a higher risk of nuclear escalation, which side cares more about a particular outcome.
So what this means is that there's generally an upper bound on the kinds of coercion that states can exercise against their nuclear-armed adversaries.
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