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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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

So potentially you can delay a state's response, and that might give you time to track their submarines and track their own mobile launchers.

And so even buying time there may be helpful.

But as you said, states invest a huge amount in resilience and redundancy and different systems that run on different frequencies and use different software to the extent that they even use digital technology at all.

So it's

Yeah, I think resilience and redundancy are going to be baked into most aspects of a state's command and control systems.

Sure, though it's worth maybe flagging that the question of whether AI will ultimately benefit cyber defenders or cyber attackers is obviously a big open question, big arguments on both sides there, but states will most certainly use AI systems to try to shore up their cyber defenses as well.

Yeah, so I think the key challenge here, as with almost every part of the Splendid First Strike that we've been discussing, is that a state needs to destroy really as much of every component of nuclear command and control at the same time with as little warning as possible.

And so that's the kind of key thing that makes this such a hard challenge.

And as we said, a few kinds of these assets, really deep bunkers, command and control aircraft, those are so difficult to destroy or disable that they're likely to remain survivable, even given plausible improvements in strike capabilities.

I think the cyber domain is the hardest to assess here, what the defenses would look like.

Vulnerabilities almost certainly exist, but so do defenses, so do patches.

And I think there are still going to be big challenges for an attacking state in the cyber domain.

You can just name three quickly.

I think first...

Nuclear-armed states are just likely to expend a ton of resources trying to defend their NC3 systems, which are probably among their best protected networks.

They'll use multiple redundant networks, they'll use different software, they'll use their own AI cyber defenses.

Second, cyber ops would probably require kind of persistent access to an adversary system.

But whenever you have persistent access, that risks detection and possible retaliation.

Anything that looks like a cyber attack on another state's nuclear command and control systems could trigger this whole escalatory spiral that states are going to want to be very cautious about.

And third, and this is kind of a recurring theme with a lot of these elements of A Splendid First Strike, it's very hard to test how well your malware actually works here in a counter-NC3 campaign.

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