本文凡一冊，正文約六萬字：共分九章廿九節。 本文主要在於探討一九七二年到一九七九年間美國最重要外交決策－－限武談判的醞 釀，進行和落幕。前四章測重事實的敘述，包括決策過程的研究，歷史背景的敘述和 實際談判的分析。後四章測重爭議性問題的剖析，包括美國國內對核子戰略及武器發 展的爭辯；美蘇和解關係的惡化和美國國內信心和共識的動搖，最後則在結論當中分 析美蘇限武談判失敗的真正原因，和對未來的展望。 除了文字性敘述之外，為使讀者便於了解起見，本文尚附有決策流程圖、談判大事記 和重要協定內容等圖表。

The thesis details the course of the civil defence debate in Britain, assesses the value of civil defence against nuclear attack and investigates other issues of concern to those involved in the debate. The thesis is divided into three parts. Part one deals with the course of the debate, the issues raised and the methods used to propogate them. The role of activists, academics and professionals is given particular emphasis. The period is charaterised as seeing the decline of civil defence, in many peoples' eyes, from a sine qua non of British defence to becoming almost an irrelevance to nuclear war. Part two, by means of the use of a reference scenario, looks in detail at the organisation and effectiveness of British civil defence against nuclear attack. It is concluded that civil defence in the long term, is unlikely to make any significant difference to the number of survivors of nuclear war. The developing knowledge and debate about the Nuclear Winter is also discussed. Part three deals with important issues in the debate which are not directly related to the effectiveness of civil defence in nuclear war. The issues, dealt with in turn, are: the current and potential effect of civil defence on civil liberties; the possible effect of civil defence on crisis stability in times of acute international tensions and the possible effectiveness of civil defence against non-nuclear attack. The conclusion offers a number of explanations as to why, given the apparent ineffectiveness of civil defence, successive governments have continued to develop it. This question is also looked at with reference to Kuhn's theory of scientific revolution and suggests that the understanding of civil defence is at present undergoing a paradigm shift. / Barrow and Geraldine S. Cadbury Trust

This article is a literature review about global catastrophic risks. Its contribution is to give an overview of the research field in general and highlight the main potential catastrophic areas linked with recent studies. In many movies and TV shows, we can see our civilization collapse in various ways: Gigantic asteroids hit the earth and obliterate all life, nuclear wars emerge, artificial intelligence evolves and starts wars with humans, pandemics spread, and other kinds of catastrophic events with mass death or extinction of all life happen. Thus, even if these are extreme events and fiction, we should raise the question how likely it is that one or more of these events can occur in the near and far future. Although calculated probabilities of impact are low for the future such as tomorrow, in 10, 100 or a million years from now, this could actually be reality. Nevertheless, why should we care about the risks of these global catastrophic events today and what could be done to prevent or reduce the risk of a global catastrophe? In this paper we will discuss core content, such as different risks and ways to reduce them internationally, as well as the scientific context of the field. In fact, there are events that can be catastrophic on a global scale and happen in the near future, even if we do not know exactly when. Hence, specific risk assessment and proper mitigation strategies are necessary in order to maintain the human population. This article states that serious research is a basis for decision makers in particular, who invest funds in countermeasures.

<p>This project argues that the nuclear bomb has made speculation an integral part of representing the material world. The bomb’s capability to cause an unprecedented extent of destruction and the constant state of latent war between nuclear-armed countries (expressed through arms race and high alert readiness) created a reality where the disasters in the future must be constantly speculated to understand the contemporary world’s material state. The tens of thousands of nuclear warheads sleeping in silos and submarines are not just the sum of their material components, but also incredibly compressed embodiments of future disasters that may be released at a moment’s notice. Regardless of the likelihood of nuclear conflicts (with which this dissertation is not concerned), the weapon exerts its influence as one of the most catastrophic possibilities even as it remains dormant. In considering the implications of nuclear weapons, all nations and people on the planet think not of what they are, but what they can do. The weapon’s possible future states define its present significance.</p><p> The inherent oxymoron of the nuclear bomb is thus that despite its staggering materiality, it is fiction as well. Any representation of the bomb that ponders its sole purpose—mass destruction—is inevitably speculative. While the degrees in which they reference empirical data vary, the narratives from which people around the world from heads of nations to common citizens learn anything at all about nuclear weaponry are forms of fiction, ranging from fantastical literary fictions to strategic fictions attempting to represent the power of the weapon that is itself fantastical. Not all representations of the weapon or nuclear war are, of course, taken seriously. Apocalyptic nuclear events are often used in popular nuclear fictions as a convenient excuse for dismantling the existing social structures and providing interesting backdrops for survivalist stories. The very fact that imaginations of hypothetical nuclear disasters have become an overused cliché all the while proliferation remains an active threat, however, also indicates that the world has been living with the horrifying prospect of nuclear disasters for decades without an actual event of the kind—that, in other words, the weapon has existed mostly as a fiction. The introduction of the nuclear bomb to the world in this sense marks a critical point in history beyond which the speculated future outcomes of the productions in the present increasingly becomes an integral part of understanding the latter.</p><p>The central concept with which I articulate the relationship between the present and the future created by nuclear weaponry is “eventuality.” Eventuality is a narrativization process through which a historical event develops into an anticipated future event as the original event’s outcome. A story about a fictional World War III involving nuclear weapons, for example, is a form of eventuality. The conceptual usefulness of eventuality is that it articulates the historical trend in the post-1945 era as well as the more recent years of climate change, in which hypothetical future events are increasingly represented not just for the purpose of knowing the future itself, but also reassessing the history to date. Eventuality establishes a causal relation between an event and its hypothetical future outcome—or its “eventual” as I call it. By drawing a line of synthetic history extending beyond the present, eventuality as a narrativization process defines the direction in which history has been heading up to the present. Compared to the postmodernist understanding of the representation of the past, eventuality is concerned with how human productions in the present already creates the future and, consequently, how the very ways in which we conceive the present is influenced by the possible futures.</p><p>To discuss the concept of eventuality in detail, the first chapter examines time travel narratives as ideal instances of eventuality. Eventuality consists in two operations running in opposite temporal directions—speculatively writing the future (prospection) and assessing history in light of that speculated future (retrospection). The literary genre that embodies this exact pair of movements is the time travel narrative. H. G. Wells’s novel <i>The Time Machine </i>(1895), the first scientific time travel story, creates a critical legacy for the genre: the assumption that the entirety of time already exists. The conceptualization of the already-existing future is important because it emphasizes the causal relation between the present and the future—the future which the time traveler witnesses is the direct outcome of his present. In the movie adaptation produced during the Cold War, the dystopian course of history is rewritten to be a nuclear war narrative, which suggests that the time travel narrative as a base frame has been appropriated by the desire to speculate the future born with the nuclear bomb. Then decades later the <i>Terminator </i>movies develop the time travel narrative as an instance of eventuality even further by creating a scenario in which the future is no longer just an uncharted territory to be explored, but an active force that has a direct sway over the present’s world. </p><p>Along with literary fictions of nuclear disasters, strategic studies on nuclear conflicts also attempt to represent the nonexistent events of future disasters. The historical significance of the advent of wargaming, a major form of nuclear strategic fiction, is that even the comparatively scientific and empirical study of nuclear war funded by the U.S. military is fundamentally speculative. The very formation and development of wargaming, in other words, is an indication that the nuclear weapon brings with it unknown possibilities for the future. The legitimacy of a wargame’s findings is dependent on that of the future projection used in the scenario. But since the latter is itself speculative and thus cannot be proven, the narrative logic of a wargame is circular or self-referential. This circularity is exactly the structure of the synthetic history in the <i>Terminator </i>films, which is a form of eventuality in which the present creates the future and the future retrospectively redefines the present.</p><p>The nuclear bomb, finally, also contributed to the advent of ecological worldview with its ecocidal nature and sheer extent of destructive capability. Geosciences in the U.S. experienced a rapid growth following the second World War, as the military pursued global surveillance for nuclear activities. Some of the same scientists who developed the weapons also began to study the interactions between radiation and the human body, as the workers in the weapons production lines began to experience radiation sickness. This kind of research was soon expanded to the study of radiation’s ecological effects on a broader scale involving not just the human bodies but also other environmental entities, organic and inorganic. Civilian research projects, in the meantime, found a widespread impact of weapons tests, including the “bone seeker” radioisotopes accumulated in the human body. Lastly, in terms of the more general way of understanding the world, the cases of radiation exposures discovered far away from the sources offered people around the world points of reference with which they could conceive an ecologically interconnected network on a planetary scale. </p>

This thesis examines civil defense in the United States under the Nixon, Carter and Reagan administrations. Throughout the late Cold War period civil defense policy planners employed a philosophy of dual-use. The Defense Civil Preparedness Agency (DCPA) and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) instructed the American public to plan for a nuclear attack as well as natural disasters. Civil defense directors implemented crisis relocation plans for Americans that lived in designated high-risk areas. In an imminent nuclear attack, Americans in high-risk areas would temporarily relocate to host communities in low-risk areas of the county. This study is a blend of both civil defense policy and the reactions to nuclear war through the prism of popular culture in the late Cold War period.

No description available.

The cantata A World Without War (2009), by Armenian-born composer Edward Manukyan (b. 1981), was written, in part, to support increased awareness of human rights issues. Based on a quote from linguist and philosopher Noam Chomsky (b. 1928), the narrative of the cantata states: "We can, for example, be fairly confident that either there will be a world without war or there won't be a world." In addition to Chomsky's words, the cantata excerpts quotes of two additional literary giants advocating human rights, Bertrand Russell (1872-1970), and Andrei Sakharov (1921-1989). The purpose of this dissertation is to focus attention on human rights activism; using Manukyan's A World Without War, I highlight moral and ethical questions at the center of this work and explain how this cantata embraces the ideal of moral cosmopolitanism. I strongly believe in the importance of human rights for all citizens of the world, and the role music plays in advancing its cause through performance arts.

Walter M. Miller, Jr.’s A Canticle for Leibowitz is a timeless story about apocalyptic cycles, conflicts and similarities between religion and science, religious ethics and secular ethics, sin and redemption, myth and preternatural innocence. Canticle is a very religious story about a monastery dedicated to preserving scientific knowledge from the time before nuclear war which devastated the world and reduced humanity to a pre-technological civilization. The Catholic Church and this monastery are portrayed as a bastion of civilization amidst barbarians and a light of faith amidst atheism. Unfortunately, humanity destroys the Earth once again, but Miller ends with two beacons of hope: a starship headed for the unknown to help humanity begin again and the preternaturally innocent Rachel who portends a future for similarly innocent human beings repopulating the Earth. Thus, faith ultimately triumphs over atheism even in the midst of almost total catastrophe.

Derek Parfit är kanske en av vår tids mest kända moralfilosofer. Parfit inleder sin första bok Reasons and Persons med att ställa frågan: vad har vi mest skäl att göra? Hans fråga berör vad som egentligen har betydelse, en fråga som han fortsätter att beröra i sin andra bok On What Matters. Filosofen Toby Ord argumenterar i sin bok The Precipice för att den utmaning som definierar vår tid, och bör ha en central prioritering, är utmaningen att skydda mänskligheten emot så kallade existentiella risker. En existentiell risk är en typ av risk som hotar att förstöra, eller förhindra, mänsklighetens långsiktiga potential. Ord menar att vi idag befinner oss vid en kritisk tidpunkt i mänsklighetens historia som kan vara helt avgörande för om det ens kommer existera en framtid för mänskligheten. Men om vi bör skydda mänskligheten emot existentiella risker, så kan en lämplig följdfråga vara i vilken ordning vi bör prioritera olika existentiella risker. Den svenske filosofen Nick Bostrom har liksom Ord länge förespråkat att existentiella risker bör tas på allvar. Han menar att preventiva åtgärder bör vidtas. I sin bok Superintelligens argumenterar Bostrom, både omfattande och väl, för att den existentiella risk som kan te sig som mest brådskande, och kanske allvarligast, är artificiell intelligens. Bostrom menar att vi har goda skäl att tro att utveckling av artificiell intelligens kan eskalera till den grad att mänsklighetens öde kan hamna bortom vår egen kontroll. Det han syftar på är att människan just nu är den dominerande agenten på jorden och därför innehar en stor kontroll, men att så inte alltid behöver vara fallet. Bostroms tes kunde te sig som okonventionell då den presenterades, men kan även te sig så idag vid en första anblick. Han har dock fått explicit medhåll av personer som Bill Gates, Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk, Yuval Noah Harari och Max Tegmark, som antingen håller med eller resonerar i liknande banor. Även jag själv finner Bostroms antaganden välgrundade. Slutsatsen som många drar är därför att vi bör betrakta artificiell intelligens som en existentiell risk som ska prioriteras högt. Jag kommer dock i denna text att argumentera för tesen att vi inte bör betrakta artificiell intelligens som en existentiell risk. Tesen följer från en invändning som jag kommer att kalla för AI-paradoxen. Det tycks enligt invändningen som att artificiell intelligens inte kan leda till en existentiell katastrof givet vissa premisser som flera i debatten om artificiell intelligens tycks acceptera. Texten i uppsatsen är strukturerad på följande sätt. I avsnitt 2 kommer jag att återge det övergripande argumentet som cirkulerar i debatten om artificiell intelligens som ett hot. I avsnittet kommer jag också förklara några viktiga termer och begrepp. I avsnitt 3 börjar jag med att titta på den första premissen i argumentet, samt resonera om dess rimlighet. I avsnitt 4 går jag sedan vidare till den andra premissen i argumentet och gör samma sak med den. Väl i avsnitt 5 så väljer jag att presentera min egen idé som jag kallar för AI-paradoxen, vilket är en invändning mot argumentet. I avsnitt 6 diskuterar jag sedan AI-paradoxens implikationer. Avslutningsvis, i avsnitt 7, så ger jag en övergripande sammanfattning och en slutsats, samt några sista reflektioner. / Derek Parfit is perhaps one of the most famous moral philosophers of our time. Parfit begins his first book Reasons and Persons by asking the question: what do we have most reason to do? His question touches upon what really matters, a question he continues to touch upon in his second book On What Matters. The philosopher Toby Ord argues in his book The Precipice that the challenge that defines our time, and should have a central priority, is the challenge of safeguarding humanity from so-called existential risks. An existential risk is a type of risk that threatens to destroy, or prevent, humanity’s longterm potential. Ord means that today we are at a critical time in the history of humanity that can be absolutely decisive for whether there will even exist a future for humanity. But if we are to safeguard humanity from existential risks, then an appropriate question may be in what order we should prioritize different existential risks. The Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom, like Ord, has long advocated that existential risks should be taken seriously. He believes that preventive measures should be taken. In his book Superintelligence Bostrom argues, both extensively and well, that the existential risk that may seem most urgent, and perhaps most severe, is artificial intelligence. Bostrom believes that we have good reason to believe that the development of artificial intelligence can escalate to the point that the fate of humanity can end up beyond our own control. What he is referring to is that humans are currently the dominant agent on earth and therefore has great control, but that this does not always have to be the case. Bostrom's thesis may have seemed unconventional when it was presented, but it can also seem so today at first glance. However, he has been explicitly supported by people like Bill Gates, Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk, Yuval Noah Harari and Max Tegmark, who either agree or reason similarly. I myself also find Bostrom's assumptions well-founded. The conclusion that many draw is therefore that we should regard artificial intelligence as an existential risk that should be given a high priority. However, in this text I will argue for the thesis that we should not regard artificial intelligence as an existential risk. The thesis follows from an objection of my own, which I call the AI ​​paradox. According to the objection, it seems that artificial intelligence cannot lead to an existential catastrophe given certain premises that many in the debate about artificial intelligence as a threat seem to accept. The text in the essay is structured as follows. In section 2 I will present the main argument circulating in the debate about artificial intelligence as a threat. In the section I will also explain some important terms and concepts. In section 3 I begin by looking at the first premise in the argument, and also reason about its plausibility. In section 4 I proceed to the second premise in the argument and examine it similarly. Once in section 5 I choose to present my own idea, which I call the AI ​​paradox, which is an objection to the argument. In section 6 I discuss the implications of the AI ​​paradox. Finally, in section 7, I give an overall summary and a conclusion, as well as some last reflections.