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.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Mar 2026 with 1.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

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

Because if you attempt to coerce them on matters that are sufficiently important to them, so things like territorial integrity or regime survival, the kind of core political interests of a state, you run the risk of nuclear escalation.

And so just to give one example to try and motivate this, if you think about the US and Russia right now, the US is economically far superior.

Its economy is like 15 times Russia.

It's...

conventionally far superior as well.

But there are real limits on how much leverage the US can exercise over Russia, because on issues that the Russians care about sufficiently, they can always threaten moves that can add risk of nuclear escalation or add risks of nuclear accident.

And that puts a pretty significant limit on how much influence the US can really wield over them.

It might be worth flagging that different countries have emphasized different approaches to securing a second strike capability.

So, you know, the US has the triad that Nikita mentioned.

The UK only has nuclear submarines.

Russia and China have road mobile launches, which are basically large trucks carrying nuclear missiles that drive around roads and highways.

And that was kind of considered politically unviable in the US because people would be so freaked out to see

nuclear weapons just driving around to their cities.

So the U.S.

does not have mobile launches.

So different states have taken different approaches, but they all revolve around this idea of kind of resilience, redundancy, and survivability.

Yeah, so you're definitely right that nuclear subs are generally viewed as the sort of most survivable leg of the triad, particularly for the US.

The US's subs are extremely hard to find.

That's really for kind of three core reasons.

The first is just that the ocean is huge.

Showing 21–40 of 361 · page 2 of 19