[pjscott]

No. Stop it. There are degrees of badness, and degrees of risk; decapitation is worse than getting a scraped knee, and car accidents are more common than cases of people being devoured by sharks. If we want to do right by everyone, and prevent horrible things from happening, but we have limited resources, then we've got to focus on things that are bad, common, and at least partially preventable.

If you understate some risks and overstate others, then you misallocate resources -- and if those resources are substantial enough to make a difference, this means that people get hurt and die because you were wrong about the severity and probability of risks. This is something where you can and should try to be right.

[justinatjustat]

whatever: nukes /are/ bad, all too common, and entirely preventable. given "they still can kill millions directly and effectively destroy civilization as we know it by wiping out potentially every major city in the world" -- what more do we want before this unacceptable risk gets adequate focus? certainly, so far, there's little risk that any resources have been 'misallocated' I'm pretty sure no-one's gonna get hurt and die because we rid the world of these weapons of mass destruction.

[rapala]

Compared to, let's say illegal small arms, nukes are not that common. And the catastrophic destruction that they can cause is extremely uncommon. There are only a few nuclear incidents of any kind that have caused direct human casualties. From this perspective, dismantling the whole nuclear arsenal of the USA would be a huge allocation of resources to remove a small threat.

[justinatjustat]

risk analysis: low likelihood x unacceptable impact is still an unacceptable risk. anyhoo, I won't be satisfied with "dismantling the whole nuclear arsenal of the USA" : I want total global elimination. perhaps we can begin by agreeing that ending the development of new nuclear weapons should not represent a huge allocation of resources. In fact, that kind of no-cost leadership by example could be the most important step towards convincing other actors to move beyond the nuclear error.

[rapala]

You can't really use unacceptable impact in risk analysis, it is too subjective. In my opinion illegal fire arms have a (high likelihood * unacceptable impact) risk. Would this risk be greater than the (low likelihood * unacceptable impact)?

Yes, no-new-nukes would be a major step forward. Unfortunately it seems that the Cold War is still on, with the USA building missile defense systems in the eastern Europe and the Russia responding with more missiles near its western borders.

[justatdotin]

when comparing unacceptable impacts, we might try: http://mapw.org.au/download/nuclear-famine-findings 'Nuclear Famine: A Billion People at Risk − Global Impacts of Limited Nuclear War on Agriculture, Food Supplies, and Human Nutrition', from the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, describes how A nuclear war using as few as 100 weapons would disrupt the global climate and agricultural production so severely that the lives of more than a billion people would be at risk.