A few of my takeaways: > We're in the middle of a very odd arms race at the moment. [...] The biggest shift that's happened over the last couple of decades is

A few of my takeaways: > We're in the middle of a very odd arms race at the moment. [...] The biggest shift that's happened over the last couple of decades is that the US has invested a lot in anti-ballistic missile technology. That has either genuinely spooked the Russians and the Chinese, or it's allowed their military industrial complexes to push for a lot of money. They have similar dynamics as we do. It doesn't matter if they actually think it will be effective or not. > The result is that both the Chinese and the Russians are developing fairly untested high-technology deterrence options, which include things like hypersonic warheads or drone-torpedoes—the kind of stuff that you would imagine they would do because they fear that their second strike capability is being affected by anti-ballistic missile technology. The US response to that is, maybe we should have some hypersonics also. It's another arms race for its own sake. > [...] Are we getting close to a similar knife-edge today? > The difficulty is that, for some of those choices, we've already chosen the path, and most people don't realize it. There are baked-in consequences of a decade of policy decisions. So even if we decided today, let's not go in this direction, it would still take active work to undo our policy decisions, much less convince the Chinese to undo theirs. my note: For a while now I have felt this sinking realization that even as global warming is slowly being understood as an existential threat, nuclear war is slipping out of our minds completely. In the end I'm afraid the two will collude to bring our civilization to collapse.