Sam Winter-Levy

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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

You can't test it against the actual target networks, because that might look like the beginning of A Splendid First Strike.

So you'll need to use virtual or perhaps even physical models of the target.

But all those simulations will only be as good as your available knowledge.

And given how secret and classified and protected these networks are, your knowledge is going to be limited.

So this testing issue, I think it affects every part of this.

Like you can't test pulling off a splendid first strike against every nuclear submarine, but you also can't test it in the cyber domain.

Yeah, and the Russians have something similar.

Famously, during the Cold War, they had what was called the Dead Hand System, also known as Perimeter, which was designed to kind of automatically trigger retaliation if it judged that a state's national command authority had been destroyed.

So even if you can take out a state's nuclear command and control system, they may well still have measures in place to try to make sure that retaliation still takes place.

Yeah, so I think, you know...

As you'll probably get the sense, like a recurring theme here is that this is a kind of move-counter-move dynamic where states are kind of responding both to technological changes and to moves of their adversaries.

And that's really been the story of nuclear deterrence really for the past 80 years.

This is not new with AI.

AI may increase the speed at which that takes place, but this move-counter-move dynamic has really played out since the early years of the Cold War.

Now...

States may adapt at different speeds from each other.

So Austin Long and Brendan Rittenhouse Green have a great paper that we can put in the show notes again on anti-submarine warfare during parts of the Cold War.

In their view, there were these windows, potentially from the 1960s to the 1980s, where the Soviets were a little bit slow to adapt both the ways in which they used their nuclear submarines and also the technology that they adopted in terms of how quiet those submarines were.

And that gave the US Navy an advantage for a brief period during the Cold War, never to the extent that you could pull off a splendid first strike, but to the extent that the US was better than is commonly acknowledged at tracking Soviet submarines.

So it's definitely not a guarantee that states will adapt or that they will adapt at the same speed.

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