In the Age of AI, Nuclear Weapons Abolition Is a Renewed Imperative

As long as we have nuclear weapons, the job of ending humanity will continue to be as easy as the push of a button—or an AI agent hacking into a nuclear command-and-control system.

By Ivana Nikolić Hughes, The Nation

The revelation that artificial intelligence (AI) may pose an existential threat to humanity has hit the Internet and the airwaves like a storm, surprising some, and leading others to debate the merits of the claims or the intentions of the leaders and employees of AI companies who are sounding the alarm. It came as no surprise to me, as I received a lecture on this very topic from my 21-year-old son when I picked him up from college in May. How the tables had turned—not only was my son teaching me something I didn’t know a whole lot about, but he was doing it on the topic of existential threats, something that I do think about a lot.

What has surprised me over the past few weeks is the contrast between the amount of attention this previously underrecognized risk—real, perhaps, but still hypothetical—has received compared to an existential threat that we have been living with for decades, that of nuclear war. Moreover, even when elaborating on how exactly AI could eviscerate humanity, nuclear weapons are often not mentioned, though they would arguably be the easiest way by which current adventurous AI agents could stumble into destroying human civilization. A malicious superintelligent AI of the future might also find it simpler to start a nuclear war than to bother with other more complicated ways of killing us all.

Ever since the arrival of large language models in virtually every aspect of our lives with the release of the first ChatGPT version, people concerned with the nuclear weapons threat have been discussing and warning about the dangers of surrendering command-and-control systems, or even just some aspects of them, to AI, and stumbling into nuclear use and a subsequent nuclear war due to an erroneous or hallucinating action of the AI. But what the Hugging Face and other incidents of AI hacking into our systems demonstrate is that AI may already be—and will certainly be capable in the future of—getting into a nuclear command-and-control system all by itself, finding a path, collaborating with other agents, and evading human supervision. AI could launch a single nuclear weapon from any country into any other country, causing unfathomable devastation that would make the tragedies of Hiroshima and Nagasaki appear benign by comparison. This is because today’s nuclear weapons are far more powerful than the earliest atomic bombs the United States used to attack Japan.