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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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 if even one submarine escapes, that's probably enough to deprive you of any kind of meaningful notion of victory.

So, yeah, it's a really hard problem.

And we're just glad, you know, one good recent paper on this is from Tom Stefanik, which I'm sure we can put in the show notes.

But in that paper, he goes through a lot of these kind of move-countermove scenarios that are likely to play out.

And in his view, he thinks that ballistic missile submarines are likely to remain reliable second-strike nuclear forces over the next 20 years and beyond.

That's his take on this.

Yeah, so it's possible.

And maybe one interesting piece of history here is that there were periods during the Cold War, particularly during the 60s to the 80s, where the US was actually pretty good at tracking Soviet submarines.

That was partly for reasons of geography and partly for reasons of technology.

So Soviet submarines weren't as quiet as American ones.

And they also had to pass through very narrow choke points.

In particular, most famously, the gap between Greenland, Iceland, and the UK.

They have to pass through these narrow choke points to get out to the open ocean.

And so there was this window where the US Navy was actually pretty good at tracking Soviet submarines.

The US didn't have this problem because the US just has direct access to kind of tens of millions of miles of ocean just from the west coast and the east coast.

So it is possible that you get windows where states will feel more confident

at different times.

But again, it kind of comes back to this whole issue here, which is just the level of confidence you need and the degree of redundancy, the degree of different systems that you need to take out simultaneously.

It's not just enough to get significantly better at tracking another state's submarines.

You need to know that you have every submarine and then every road mobile launcher and every ICBM, which I'm sure we'll come on to in a little bit.

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