City Walk and Nuclear Talk: 4,800 Steps from Your Likes

Thanks to your likes, I took 4,800 steps to see whether I could meaningfully increase my survival chance if a nuclear bomb were dropped on Sydney. I took the opportunity to talk about nuclear war, including:
• Oppenheimer
• Fallout
• War Games
• Historical close calls (Stanlisav Petrov, Vasili Arkhipov, B-52 crashes)
• What it’s like living with fear of nuclear war
• Mutually assured destruction
• Living in fear of nuclear war
• How to increase survival chance in a nuclear war (slightly)
• Why space exploration may have increased nuclear weapons capabilities

Photo of Vasili Arkhipov - Image courtesy by Olga Arkhipova, CC BY-SA 4.0

0:00 Introduction
2:10 How many nuclear weapons are there?
6:30 Oppenheimer and other depictions
13:12 Nuclear close calls in history
17:50 Living in fear of nuclear war
19:40 What to do if you see a nuclear explosion
24:35 Mutually assured destruction
35:35 Dark Skies
38:15 Nuclear Threat Initiative
39:30 General talking and walking
50:38 Finished

[spacescienceguy]

If you have any other questions or thoughts about nuclear war, please drop them here!

[LawrenceAnton]

I really enjoyed this video, if you did more videos where you walk and talk, I would watch them. Not sure why, but there is something about ‘going for a walk’ that I enjoy in a video.

[tamcon]

I'm sorry about your back injury; must have been a nuisance for someone so active and I hope you get back to full health soon. I am very fortunate in that I do not wish to survive a nuclear war. When I was a tween, my mother befriended a young immigrant doctor from Ukraine at church. It turned out he had been one of the first medical doctors sent to Pripyat right after the Chornobyl explosion in April of 1986. We watched him year by year slowly succumb to the long-term effects of radiation poisoning. He died of liver cancer just shy of 40. I appreciate your discussion of this topic so frankly and all the walking you did in such a determined way, but at least the setting was beautiful! Thanks for posting!

[spacescienceguy]

I can't recommend this recent 80, 000 Hours podcast episode about how a nuclear war would play out with Annie Jacobsen enough. It's extremely chilling, but extremely important.


Unfortunately, I heard about it and listened to it after I filmed this video. It would have increased my understanding of what nuclear war would look like.

[LawrenceAnton]

I’ve only just started the video so you may answer this question, but how is it how could AI be used in nuclear weapons systems?