From Bryn Glover, Ripon, North Yorkshire, UK
Your short piece on the apparent willingness of AI models to deploy nuclear weapons without the usual human reservations doesn’t indicate whether the AI involved had been made aware of the possibility of nuclear winter. The bombs themselves have been tested and their destructive capabilities are well known. However, the nature of a nuclear winter must obviously remain untested. Will it actually destroy all life on Earth, or only part of it? Therefore, the number of warheads needed to trigger the phenomenon must always be a matter of informed guesswork. The total global number of warheads has been reduced, but the trigger for a nuclear winter could be as low as 50, or even fewer. Surely human war-planners are aware of this possibility, but is AI?
