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

Or at least that if the other side thinks that you can meaningfully limit damage, then that will make US threats to escalate more credible, which could contribute to deterrence.

So this question of what meaningful damage limitation is, ultimately that's not a technological question, that's a political one.

And it's going to be very difficult to define that ex ante, what will constitute unacceptable damage to a nation's day.

And it's going to depend on mistakes and the leaders and psychology and all sorts of factors that it's hard to reason about in advance.

But I would just say this is like a live area of debate in the nuclear policy field.

And just to put a finer point on it, like, launching a splendid first strike here involves launching hundreds, potentially thousands of nuclear weapons at another state based on, you know, a belief that you have 100% probability of pulling it off.

Like, that's a huge gamble to... That's a huge... That's just a huge move to act on.

And I think, yeah, this kind of...

And I think there's still this broader question of willingness to act on a capability.

So the United States had nuclear weapons for a period of time before the Soviet Union did, but it didn't act on that advantage for various historical reasons.

But the broader reason is that there are ethical, political, and international norms that often constrain states from using the full extent of their available power.

So U.S.

leaders at the time did not want to...

did not think the public would tolerate launching a nuclear strike, a preemptive nuclear strike on the Soviets.

They didn't want to trigger another war.

They didn't want to be seen as the aggressor in a new conflict.

So there are a bunch of other considerations that might continue to constrain states' capabilities, even in a world where a state had the potential to pull off a splendid first strike.

And I think one final point here is that even if you do have unchallenged

technological advantage that doesn't always translate straightforwardly into the sort of political dominance some people talk about when they talk about AI giving you the ability to just impose your political preferences worldwide, complete dominance and control of the type that people like Dan Hendricks have written about.

So just to give one example, the US had clearly had unquestionable technological dominance over

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