In the last post, I did a surface level exploration of several cases of anti-war activism and policy in the 20th and 21st century, to show that while there are some great victories, not all peace inspired policy changes are unambiguously good. In this post, we’ll explore an area of high importance, and learning value for other future risks. One where I think there is a great deal of expertise, which the effective altruism movement has not tapped into: nuclear policy.

Where we are now:



The following video with Max Tegmark shows a set of views toward nuclear policy that seem to be fairly casually promoted within EA.









The core points of the video are:

Nuclear winter is probably the worst aspect of a nuclear exchange and could cause global starvation.

The U.S. and Russia each have enough weapons to cause this outcome on their own.

Accident is the most likely way for a nuclear exchange between superpowers to occur.

There have been many close calls, so it is only a matter of time before an exchange happens by accident.

Only a small number of nuclear weapons are needed to deter nuclear war, and additional weapons only increase risk without adding more deterrence value.

Moneyed interests and politicians are the primary reason for current and planned arsenal sizes, and stigmatizing nuclear weapons companies via divestment is a good strategy for reducing arms and increasing safety.

What I agree with:

We should care a lot about nuclear weapons because they are a very large risk.

Among the risks of nuclear war, the risk of nuclear winter is probably the worst.

Accident is currently the most likely way for a nuclear exchange between superpowers to occur.

What I might agree with:

It would be nice if there were fewer nuclear weapons across the board.

It’s just unclear what the optimal reduction would be, countries should avoid giving away superpower status (they won’t if they can help it) and creating opportunities for Thucydides traps or incentives for other nuclear powers, less constrained by democracy, to race ahead and attempt to gain relative power at lower cost than they can currently.



Where my view is probably different:

(click the paragraphs below for more justifying bullet points)

When accidental nuclear war is more likely than deliberate use, deterrence is likely a contributing factor to that situation. It does not make sense to reduce deterrence levels unless the result is actually a net reduction of risk. Further points on accidental vs. deliberate use: Without access to classified information, it seems difficult to be generally sure a nuclear exchange is more likely to result from an accident than deliberate use. While an exchange is probably in no one’s self-interest now , as technology, geopolitics, and the climate change, stable equilibriums may be disrupted unless we intentionally develop technologies and policies to maintain stability. Due to posturing, one country or another could happen to be in a position to quickly gain a decisive strategic advantage, without there being public knowledge of such a situation. It is not always guaranteed that defense will have cheap ways to retaliate. As command and control technology gets more advanced, there are less significant false alarms and more resilience. Unless there have been massive cover-ups, the only times that nuclear weapons have been detonated at remotely close to full yield has been in deliberate use. If you look at FLI’s timeline of near misses , there aren’t really any recent mistakes that actually have a decent chance of resulting in nuclear war. The closest might have been the 1995 Norwegian Rocket Launch, but even if the Russians didn’t find out it was a Norwegian rocket, they still would have realized from their radar that there was only one and that it wasn’t heading for them. This isn’t to dismiss the importance of other mistakes, just to say that the danger level of more recently listed mistakes is much lower than other mistakes in the cold war.



The ability of a small number of nuclear weapons to deter nuclear attack may just be a situational fact, caused by alliances and superpowers with more weapons. Nuclear weapons may also deter more than just nuclear war. The point of tactical nuclear weapons is to deter even non-nuclear war: without them, NATO presumably would have had to spend far more on conventional force protecting Europe in the Cold War. This, of course, is a risk, because the actual use of tactical nuclear weapons to halt a war could result in escalation to the use of strategic nuclear weapons. Though such a risk may also add further deterrence value against starting conventional wars between superpowers in the first place.

We should avoid binary thinking when reasoning about nuclear weapons: adding additional weapons probably both increases deterrence value and increases state/accident risk, but it depends on how many weapons a country already has. A rogue state with one nuclear weapon in a known location invites an incapacitation strike probably more than one without such a weapon, but as it gains more weapons and the ability to hide or protect them it becomes able to deter intervention. In the case of North Korea, incapacitation was deterred via their ties with China and ability to greatly harm South Korea with artillery. Syria and Iran, on the other hand, were incapacitated by Israel in the past before they could get decisive leverage over Israel’s interests. The deterrence value per nuclear weapon shifts with time: various technologies make incapacitating strikes more or less possible, and the amounts countries spend on these technologies shift the optimal deterrence level. Though I doubt U.S. and Russian numbers of weapons are optimal, having nuclear weapons in reserve (provided they are secure) makes a lot of sense if you need to quickly add weapons to re-establish optimal deterrence levels. If either the U.S. or Russia only had 200 nuclear weapons, while the other maintained its current level, it could be tempting for the more powerful one to try to incapacitate the other in a time of serious crisis. Why? With a small number of missiles, the risk from a small false alarm might increase, since a smaller number of weapons would be expected to be launched in a first strike. In the future, a country with a large advantage might actually be able to assure with high probability that they stop every opposing missile in a first strike if they find and sink their opponent’s submarines, use stealthy cruise or hypersonic missiles on opposing missile fields and air bases, and use missile defense to stop any missiles that get through (such missile defense need not be cost effective on a per warhead basis if very few warheads get launched). Countries like China, the U.K., France, and North Korea are not counterexamples to this claim, since a first strike against any would disadvantage the attacking superpower against the remaining superpower, possibly involving direct retaliation. There may yet be ways for U.S. and Russia to maintain peace with much lower numbers of weapons, but this may require assurance of long-run good diplomacy or technology that is not currently being used to assure deterrence. Effective diplomacy is very likely to be more cost-effective than relying on high deterrence levels, and to generally have positive cooperative side effects, but it can’t insure against all of the same situations that deterrence can.

If a country uses its small number of nuclear weapons against one attacking country, it may be subsequently defenseless against other nuclear powers.

Though this discourages countries from being aggressors themselves, it may incentivize countries to use deception to try to get others to fight each other in order to gain an advantage. This sort of situation can be seen in multi-faction conflicts (Syria, Pakistan vs. India vs. terror groups, etc.) or the “truel” in game theory. Basically, in a three-way conflict the first actor to attack damages one opponent and reduces their own resources doing so: the remaining, unharmed opponent gains a large advantage from this. If the first actor tries to take out both opponents, they divide their focus and may cause their opponents to temporarily unite. If all parties are roughly equal, you win by tricking or forcing your opponents into attacking each by whatever means are available. This is why some states like arming terror/rebel groups even when they aren’t that value aligned with the funding state: it allows a country to advance its own geopolitical interests while getting its enemies (terrorists and opposing state forces) to kill each other. The funding state only loses small arms instead of its own troops and more expensive equipment, while also maintaining plausible deniability (eg. Pakistan does not want to directly go to war with India, but if militias hurt India strategically more than Pakistan, and serve as a buffer zone, then they advance Pakistan’s strategic interests more overall even though they keep attacking Pakistan as well).



Moneyed interests probably aren’t the key influences on demand for nuclear weapons-related programs given that the Pentagon’s proposed budget and the budget authorized by Congress are the same for weapon systems that support nuclear weapons (eg. the B-2, B-52, ballistic missile replacement, air-launched cruise missiles, squadron spending for nuclear forces among many others). The only exception I could find is a less than 1% budget cut for unjustified program growth for modifications to the Trident II missile, though there may be another possible exception with the Department of Energy Nuclear Budget This overall argument might be untrue if it is the case that the military figures out exactly what Congress is willing to pay, and then asks for that. I think this is the strongest argument against this point. This probably happens to some degree, but it is still the case that when Congress decides to throw extra money at something, it usually is not the nuclear budget, and furthermore, it would be the military arguing for the spending to be specifically on nuclear weapons, not politicians and lobbyists.

The influence of lobbyists and politicians seems more along the lines of spreading program expenses over more congressional districts, than determining IF a program is going to exist or not. People may talk about Congress buying tanks the military doesn’t want, but in the grand scheme of things in a multi-hundred billion dollar defense budget, building more armored vehicles is a “cheap” way to keep some jobs around your state if you are a congressman. Roughly speaking, the military knows what it wants and Congress gives it much of what it wants.

If the problem is defense contractors directly/discretely lobbying the military, then the people to engage with would be the generals and others in the Pentagon who make/determine budget requests. If we think we have good arguments for why they are wrong about what spending levels should be on nuclear modernization, then we should discuss and debate with them. Think tank analysts and technical congressional staffers may have some influence in this process by developing technical expertise and being able to argue for different budget levels.

A commenter pointed out that there may be some influence via the DOE Budget since they are directly in control of nuclear weapons spending. For 2016, the weapons budgets match, however, the budget is growing, and Congress may have approved more for 2017 than the administration/military requested. The 2018 request is a large increase, and also decreases spending on non-proliferation (which sounds undesirable to me, but I am unsure what the optimal spending level is). It could be an example of influence by the Heritage Foundation as they seem to also generally influence this administration’s budget. Nevertheless, the arguments made by Heritage still rest on U.S. warhead development capacity being weak and outdated.

Another commenter essentially pointed out that if Congress authorizes zero funding, there would be no weapons spending: therefore moneyed interests/politicians have influence. This is true, but misses the point: the spending is authorized because there is a perceived need, not because politicians have been bought. It does seem plausible that the small cut in trident missile modification could have been via a congressional staffer trying to slowthe U.S. from developing the ability to perform a first strike (trident missiles have been being modified so that they are more accurate and detonate with precise timing so as to take out hardened targets such as missile silos).



So given all this, what should we do? What would be a good way forward for reducing nuclear risks while not creating other worse risks? The most important starting point is probably to develop understanding of the relevant considerations.

Within the Effective Altruism community, Open Philanthropy Project published their initial research exploring this area in September 2015, and organizations like the Global Catastrophic Risk Institute have built fault trees for determining the probability of accidental nuclear exchange and the best intervention points for risk reduction. On nuclear policy, 80,000 Hours currently recommends focusing on these options:

Work on improving foreign relations between the main nuclear powers and defusing any potential (the US, UK, France Russia and China);

Convince politicians or voters in these countries to prioritise avoiding war above other concerns;

Ensure that monitoring of first strikes, and communication between nuclear powers, is sufficiently good to prevent a false alarm escalating into a full-scale war;

Ensure nuclear materials are safely guarded and cannot be used by rogue actors;

Prevent the development of ballistic missile defense in the U.S. in hopes of making U.S.-Russia and U.S.-China mutual arms reductions more likely;

Work on improving foreign relations at other nuclear weapon flashpoints, such as India and Pakistan, North Korea, or Iran and Israel;

Shrink nuclear stockpiles;

Improve civilian resiliency and recovery in the face of an EMP attack;

Prevent nuclear proliferation.

Many of these basically sound mostly like great options, but hard to pursue, so in the remainder of this post I will focus on a subset of the problem: the difficulty of safe arms reduction.

To reduce nuclear arsenals, some suggest we “start at home” and that a drastic decrease in U.S. expenditure may cause a reciprocal response from the rest of the world. I worry this is a little naive.

When the U.S. finally started decreasing its nuclear arsenal in the 1960’s this didn’t generate a reciprocal response from the Soviet Union. Then again in the mid-70s, the U.S. began reducing its arsenal again (though after a build up, perhaps to increase its negotiating position) and the USSR kept building up until Mikhail Gorbachev became the General Secretary of the USSR and tensions with the West were eased.

If we want activism to be effective, perhaps the relevant consideration is how democratic and susceptible to pressure are all the parties with nuclear weapons. If only some parties cave into the pressure, then the parties that do not just keep gaining advantage in world affairs.

Are there any ways that the U.S. could give up weapons without increasing the strategic advantage of other countries? During the next round of nuclear modernization, what can be cut? What sacrifices will generals actually find completely acceptable given how advanced Russia’s current ability is and how China may grow? Its best to start by taking inventory of what there is, and arguments for and against each part as well as potential future parts.

The triad:

The nuclear triad consists of nuclear-armed submarines, bombers, and intercontinental ballistic missiles. The purpose of having a nuclear triad is to ensure that if one part fails, there will be others that can ensure deterrence, making war against a superpower an illogical move. The U.S. is currently deciding how it will modernize its triad, and some consider this to be a good opportunity for reductions in nuclear arms.

Estimates of U.S. nuclear modernization cost range from hundreds of billions to over a trillion dollars in the next 20-30 years, but given the planning fallacy, I won’t be placing any bets on specific levels.

So, would it make sense to not renew some part of the triad, and to try to negotiate for reductions in Russian arms in the process? Click each section below for pros and cons details:

Land-based missiles: Immobile Missiles Pro Land-based missiles are an unambiguous deterrent, as they cannot be attacked without provoking an attack. Due to their speed, land-based missiles may be able to destroy some military targets in retaliation and are hard to destroy in the first place. When launched, land-based missiles are obvious due to spies and early warning satellites, so they can’t be used to incapacitate, as they would provoke retaliation. This may not be the case when warning satellites are broken, but it is less likely in the future that such systems will go offline. Land-based missiles focus enemy warheads into unpopulated areas (fewer fires than cities, less nuclear winter, less civilian casualties) vs. air bases and naval ports that are closer to population centers. Though the fall out pattern from striking missile fields in the Midwestern U.S. could do a lot of harm to U.S. and Canadian cities: There is a very large cost to destroying land-based missiles since they are spread out over large areas and hardened. The difficulty of destroying silos causes a second layer of deterrent: ⅔ of Russia’s missiles would be needed to destroy US land-based ICBM’s and there is no way to do that without pre-mobilization, which the U.S. could detect via satellite, offering the U.S. chance to pre-stage, harden, and/or disperse other nuclear forces. A potential counterargument to this is that in the future Russia might mobilize anyway when trying to use brinkmanship to gain an advantage, and in such situations risk will be elevated as long as the weapons stay pre-mobilized. High responsiveness/guaranteed communication increases deterrence value (submarines and aircraft could have their communications jammed, and with a lack of information it seems reasonable that such forces would try to self-preserve and not attack unless their protocol says to and such protocols would be very risky.) Land-based missiles work and are hard to counter even if technological developments destroy the advantage of stealth. Land-based missiles are the lowest cost nuclear system in the triad. Land-based missiles are resistant to cyber attack since they c urrently use older hard to hack technology. Land-based missiles are highly reliable based on testing and lack of wear and tear from deployment. They are unlikely to be “grounded” for safety/maintenance all at once, unlike submarines or aircraft. Con Land-based missiles have high potential accident risk from being kept on hair-trigger alert. A counter-argument to this is that there exists a lot of more technology and institutional knowledge for preventing accidents than before. Sensor technologies have matured. Cuts to nuclear modernization could lead to lack of funding for command and control which would increase accident risk and deterioration of existing systems, but these sorts of cuts seem unlikely to come first. This could also be countered by taking missiles off hair-trigger alert, provided that there remains a way to mitigate any advantages that could be derived from re-alerting missiles. Immobile missiles are an easy target for first strike (most if not all locations are probably known). Since missiles in silos are hardened targets, weapons which target them would be very low altitude bursting weapons, which would generate large amounts of fallout, if nuclear. If faster missiles keep being developed, then there will be even less time to deal with any potential false alarms.

Mobile missiles Pro The pros above for immobile missiles mostly also apply to mobile land-based missiles, though mobile missiles are not always hardened. Mobility reduces the ease of missiles being targeted for first strike, which reduces the necessity for a launch on warning policy depending on circumstances. The difficulty of finding such missiles likely reduces the number of missiles needed for optimal deterrence. Truck mobile missiles are probably less expensive than silo-based missiles, since one does not have to build a silo complex. Con Mobile missiles are harder to harden and protect. If underground tunnels are used, building hardened launch points is probably more expensive than making new missiles at hardened launch points without paying for so many miles of tunnels… therefore there is an incentive to just make more missiles instead of having mobile underground missiles. Launch points are also likely to be targetable just as current silos are targetable, which removes much of the value of mobility. If there are more launch points than missiles, it is hard to have treaty verification that the number of weapons has actually been reduced. Mobile missiles are more vulnerable to terrorists who might try to steal a warhead. This vulnerability can be mitigated via security procedures/designs that would make it effectively impossible for such terrorists to create any weapon yield (I believe this is already the case for most countries with mobile missiles). Mobile missiles are not being considered by U.S. Air Force currently.



Other potentially destabilizing technologies:

New stealth technology Pro New stealth technology could deter first strike if it works, as it helps assure retaliation. This, however, relies on stealth weapons not being hit on the ground/in port. More technologically advanced powers will have a competitive advantage in stealth, which may lead to less instability during proliferation of such technology as it may take a lot of time to copy. Con New missiles, submersibles, and drones which could approach a country with minimal chance of detection could make nuclear first strikes more possible. Stealth weapons could also increase the odds that false alarms are seen as attacks, as noise picked up by radar could be perceived as an attack. More advanced radars, infrared sensors, and other means of detection may solve this problem by sensor fusion and machine learning that is good at ignoring noise. It would be hard for mere noise to throw off multiple systems at once which seek different independent indicators (IR, radar, etc.). This however reduces the deterrence value of stealthy nuclear bombers and cruise missiles, as they could become much easier to shoot down (if radar is not destroyed) though doing so can still be very hard.

Advanced missile defense Pro If one country gains this ability fast enough, with respect to nuclear strategy it could become a singleton, potentially stop proliferation and cause global cooperation on differential technological development toward avoiding other risks in the future (synthetic viruses, adversarial use of machine learning, AI accidents etc.) This seems is very unlikely, very expensive, and to also have some large downside risks (potential totalitarian state). Missile defense is probably too expensive to stop superpowers, so it won’t undermine MAD, but it can stop rogue states from being able to accomplish a long-range attack since superpowers can afford to spend far more than small states. Almost every means of making missile defense inexpensive is currently not very feasible and may be easy to counter: Lasers? Problems: Hard to focus at long range, obscured by atmosphere, too heavy to get close to launch points where missiles are vulnerable I once did a Fermi estimate based on the YAL-1 which indicated the need for a balloon/blimp the size of a football stadium to support such a laser near the border of North Korea if one has the goal of destroying a missile in the boost phase. Though recent developments in making electric-powered lasers lighter, and getting drones to fly higher may lead to a situation where high endurance anti-ballistic missile laser drones become cost effective especially if a power source such as the Lockheed Martin Compact Fusion Reactor comes online in the next 10 years. This is highly speculative, and it seems unlikely all these technologies will be figured out in the near future. Counters: Warhead shielding, cloud obscuration Though if the high altitude laser drones work, they won’t need to worry about clouds at such an altitude, and it is probably extremely difficult to shield an entire ballistic missile to the level required to prevent destruction Railguns? Problems: low rate of fire, not good enough materials currently to sustain weapon Though recently the rate of fire and material endurance has begun increasing Counters: MIRVs Though perhaps if a country does not care about railguns being destroyed by firing, it could build enough to defend an area if the cost of an entire railgun is lower than the cost of a marginal nuclear warhead being added to a MIRV missile Low altitude anti-ballistic missiles Problem: Must be extremely fast, may need to be nuclear Counter: Cruise missiles High altitude large area effect anti-ballistic missiles Problems: Expensive per shot Counters: Neutron shielded warheads, fast MIRVs, and decoys that make it unlikely for one blast to destroy multiple incoming warheads Con If one country becomes a singleton via missile defense advantage, it could lock the world into a bad state of affairs going into the future, though as stated before it is unlikely to succeed at becoming singleton in the first place. If some countries spend more on missile defense, others have to spend more on nuclear weapons to restore the same level of deterrence. Alternatively, if treaties on warhead and missile limits stay constant and are not violated this could lead to a focus on making missiles faster and more maneuverable, which in turn could reduce the time available to resolve false alarms. It is also possible that U.S. missile defense ambitions undermined the opportunity for the U.S. and Soviet Union to get rid of nuclear weapons in the past, though it is hard to imagine that agreement would actually have been reached, especially with respect to other nuclear countries. It is more likely both sides wanted to appear willing to give up more weapons to signal non-hostility.

Increased precision of weapons Pro Increase precision allows the use of smaller warheads which would result in less risk of nuclear winter due to smaller fire areas, less fallout, and less direct deaths from an exchange. Con Accuracy is the most useful for counterforce/first strikes and the ability to perform a counterforce strike can be destabilizing. The expected reduction in harm to civilians could make countries more willing to use such weapons in the first place (both accidentally and deliberately).

Advances in electronic warfare Pro Though very unlikely, a country could potentially disrupt the command and control of other nuclear powers electronically to halt their ability to launch. Presumably, this is mostly not possible by design, and the relevant designs are probably classified to maintain that state of affairs. Con Hacking command and control could be possible, which could lead to spreading false information or unauthorized launch. Such hacking however is probably close to impossible by design. If hypersonic and stealth missiles encourage further automation of command and control, it will be important to make sure any machine learning dependent systems are not vulnerable to adversarial examples.



Overall, nuclear policy is complex, and new technologies can completely shift what is best to do: with optimal deterrence and extreme instability being near neighbors in some pairings of technologies. The purpose of this post is to show that good policy is contingent on the technological and strategic situation countries find themselves in, and that making blunt pushes for different policies are likely to be unimpactful on policy or harmful if impactful. Without radical improvements in governments and diplomacy around the world, stable and reciprocal arms reductions will probably need to be paired with new means of deterring anyone from building new nuclear capacity if a world without nuclear risk is desired. Without such an approach, arms reduction itself could create the instability that would lead to a nuclear war in the first place.

There are people, probably smarter than us, who spend the better part of their lives on the strategy of this at places like the RAND Corporation, the DoD Office of Net Assessment, the Center for New American Security, and the Center for Strategic and International Studies. The last thing we want as a community is to discredit ourselves by talking about things where we have weak information and knowledge compared to the current policymakers when we do want policymakers and think tanks to listen to us about something we are likely to develop a rather advanced understanding of (AI policy). If we want to create stigma, and make recommendations, then we should do the research, and engage with those who know more about this subject than we do… if we don’t think the research is worth doing because AI is more important and the people in government and think tanks are doing a great job, then we shouldn’t be insulting them.

Notes:

Instead of making you scroll back and forth for citations and elaboration, I tried to use argument compression and links above to make this article easier to navigate. For this notes section then, I list some other resources and arguments which I think partially informed this post even if I did not mention them explicitly: (click the paragraphs below for more info)

In this documentary from the Nuclear Threat Initiative the idea of getting rid of nuclear weapons comes up in the context of being able to deter any nuclear program: If strong deterrence can be done without nuclear weapons or something worse, that would seem like a better state of affairs: world peace without continued catastrophic risk as root the cause. Though the documentary is more about preventing nuclear terrorism than global risk, it still has relevant points. If you want nuclear weapons to go away, you can’t be the first to give them up unless you trust others with extreme power over you.

Controlling fuel sources and providing nuclear fuel that can be used only for power at low cost may be a decent strategy to bargain other countries into not pursuing uranium enrichment. Though there could be a perverse incentive to start nuclear programs to extract free resources from wealthier countries that use this strategy Of course, that doesn’t work if the superpowers get control of all uranium sources



Command and Control by Eric Schlosser is a great book about past nuclear accidents. You can see a PBS documentary covering a lot of similar information here. Basically, you learn that there are probably way more accidents than you thought, and that nuclear security and safety used to be far worse.

Roughly half the book focuses on the story of the Damascus Incident, to give a more visceral sense of things that went wrong, however, this may have led the story to have a bias in favor of the perspective of enlisted troops over officers. Example: in a fire where a welder literally drowned in hydraulic fluid it is probably safe to assume that he accidentally cut into the hydraulic line.



On current weapons and strategy, Binkov the sock puppet is often a great intro resource for becoming aware of what technologies exist, relevant papers, and strategic considerations, though each scenario described is more like a silly war game than real life. Obviously, this isn’t a very scholarly source, but it is pretty decent given how he summarizes different weapon system abilities and considerations in terms of physics.

This First Strike documentary series from the late 70’s is a bit out of date, unrealistic, and filled with propaganda, but makes some decent points about deterring first strike. Example of first strike concern and blackmail using cities: ( Part 1

Unilateral self-restraint does not end arms races, planes are an easy target ( Part 2

Submarines (in the past) were mostly good against unprotected targets like cities which both the Russians and U.S. would have liked to avoid hitting. ( Part 3

Low flying bombers might have been able to contribute to incapacitating strikes to some degree in the 80s. (though an aggressor unable to destroy submarines would not be successful) The relative power of different countries influences foreign policy significantly even when there is no war (this is very obvious, but seems neglected by those who argue for unilateral disarmament) I don’t necessarily agree with those interviewed that the U.S. should have spent more on defense during that time window, since committing a lower % of GDP to defense probably results in a better economic advantage over time for a country though there is short-term risk. This can’t be said for research which enhances economic advantage, however (high investment things like the internet which enable new start-ups and economic activity)(Part 4)



The Project on Nuclear Issues at the Center for Strategic and International Studies has had several debates on nuclear modernization and threats recently where you could directly speak with experienced scholars and generals in the field of nuclear security.

Compared to other debates, there don’t seem to be many attempts at cheap shots or rhetorical moves, so the discussion norms are rather good for constructive disagreement between sides.

If you live near think tanks, it may be worth watching out for similar events.

On a final note, though I don’t agree with everything on it, I highly recommend the Arms Control Wonk Podcast, since they are very good at attacking bad ideas, as well as explaining the strategic capabilities and negotiating advantages of different countries.