AMA: Christian Ruhl (senior global catastrophic risk researcher at Founders Pledge)

Hi Angelina! Thanks for the great question! There are several government actors, like DTRA, the Minerva Research Initiative, and the STRATCOM Academic Alliance, that play an important role in the non-governmental nuclear security space, including with funding. Then there are the National Labs as well as FFRDCs and UARCs that receive government funding and often work on relevant issues. Then there are defense contractors that will provide funding to think tanks and organizations that just so happen to support the latest weapons systems. 

But that funding isn’t really optimized for reducing risk from nuclear weapons. I also think it isn’t (as some advocates would have us believe) the evil plans of crazy war-mongers. Rather, it’s just bureaucratic actors pursuing their bureaucratic incentives, and the result is kind of muddled work that mostly just supports programs of record and the conventional wisdom. 

So I think that’s where private philanthropy can really do a lot of good. I really like this quote from the recent Vox piece that Matt Gentzel and I wrote:

As James Scouras, a senior expert on the risk of nuclear war at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory recently wrote in response to the Founders Pledge report, philanthropy can help challenge “unimaginative, even wrongheaded and dangerous, government policies.” Nuclear risk, he writes, is “far too important to leave to the generals.” 

also:

Philanthropists can devote resources to policy interventions intended to bear fruit beyond the current election cycle and to protect people regardless of what side of an international border they’re on. Without careful philanthropy, policy influence outside government becomes a contest between defense industry lobbying and under-informed activism.

This is the part that I think is in a sorry state. The MacArthur Foundation — previously the biggest funder in nuclear security — withdrew what amounted to about 32% of the field’s total funding, distributing the final grants this year. That leaves the field with funding somewhere around $30-$40 million a year. (The exact numbers here are less important than the order of magnitude — compare it to the numbers on any other major global problem, or even to the $100 million budget of the Oppenheimer movie). This is all happening against the background of an aging field and small talent pipeline, as well as new risks on the horizon (like China potentially quadrupling its arsenal). Then within that, the large funders are fairly homogenous in their worldviews, leading some very important issues to be doubly neglected.

I think there’s a general perception that nuclear security is highly professionalized and well-funded compared to other global catastrophic risks, and that had been partly true for a long time. For various reasons, I wouldn’t argue that nuclear security should receive more funding than biosecurity and risks from transformative technologies, for example. But we’re now in a place where a single wealthy donor could double the philanthropy on nuclear issues, and yet no one has stepped in! So all the changes to the risk landscape are going un-studied and I think we will look back with regret if this funding does not increase.

Hope this answers your question!

Thanks for the question, Johannes! My best elevator pitch is roughly an ITN case that starts with neglectedness:

The biggest funder in nuclear security just withdrew from the field, leaving only ~$32 million/year in philanthropic funding. That's a third of the budget of Oppenheimer, and several orders of magnitude smaller than philanthropic spending on climate change. This is a huge blow to a field that's already small and aging, and would leave defense contractors and bureaucrats to determine nuclear policy. But it's also an opportunity to reshape the field for the better to deal with new challenges: unravelling arms control agreements, emerging technologies and new weapons systems, and a new world where there are three nuclear superpowers (two of them revisionist authoritarian states). Best of all, there are cheap funding opportunities! For example, $500,000 lets you triple the number of backchannel diplomatic exchanges between the U.S. and China on strategic nuclear issues. And there is low-hanging fruit that other funders ignore for non-impact-related reasons

For EAs, I would add that we don't need to get bogged down in the debates about nuclear winter and extinction -- nuclear war is:

1. A major global catastrophic risk for current generations in terms of death, suffering, grief, infrastructure and economic damage, and long-term radiation effects. And...
2. A potential existential risk factor with a technology that is already here and deployed. Consider
   1. What cost-benefit calculations would Russia start to make about mass-casualty bioweapons as it depletes its nuclear arsenal in a protracted great power war?
   2. Where do your compute supply chain chokepoints go after a limited nuclear war in the Indo-Pacific?
   3. Do we really want to roll the dice on post-war values, global leadership, and the prospects of international cooperation?

Given this, I think $30 million to double the funding starts looking like a reasonable hits-based bet

Definitely difficult. I think my colleagues' work at Founders Pledge (e.g. How to Evaluate Relative Impact in High-Uncertainty Contexts) and iterating on "impact multipliers" to make ever-more-rigorous comparative judgments is the most promising path forward. I'm not sure that this is a problem unique to GCRs or climate. A more high-leverage risk-tolerant approach to global health and development faces the same issues, right?

Maybe, but I'm not really qualified to say much about this. I do think we need to think beyond New START (which was going to need a follow-on agreement anyway), and beyond arms control as "formal, legally binding, ratified treaties." I think some nonprofits and funders have been playing a very reactive kind of whack-a-mole game when it comes to nuclear security, reacting to the latest news about new weapon systems, doctrinal changes, and current events. Instead, are there ways to think bigger about arms control, to make some of these ideas more politically palatable to conservative administrations, and to discuss strategic stability with China as well as Russia?

I would say cash-constrained. There are plenty of good opportunities out there, and a field of smart scholars, advocates, and practitioners with transferable skills. Just need a lot more money

Thanks for the question! In 3 years, this might include:

• Overall, "right of boom" interventions make up a larger fraction of funding (perhaps 1/4), even as total funding grows by an order of magnitude
• There are major public and private efforts to understand escalation management (conventional and nuclear), war limitation, and war termination in the three-party world.
• Much more research and investment in "civil defense" and resilience interventions across the board, not just nuclear. So that might include food security, bunkers, transmission-blocking interventions, better P4E, better national stockpiles and distribution systems, resilient crisis-communication systems, etc. 
• There are multiple ongoing track 2 and 1.5 talks, and eventually official dialogues between the U.S., Russia, and China to better understand each other's views on limited war and find common ground on risk reduction measures and arms control beyond formal treaty-based tools

A few that come to mind:

• Risk-general/threat-agnostic/all-hazards risk-mitigation (see e.g. Global Shield and the GCRMA)
• "Civil defense" interventions and resilience broadly defined
• Intrawar escalation management
• Protracted great power war

I think in general, it's a trade-off along the lines of uncertainty and leverage -- GCR interventions pull bigger levers on bigger problems, but in high-uncertainty environments with little feedback. I think evaluations in GCR should probably be framed in terms of relative impact, whereas we can more easily evaluate GHD in terms of absolute impact.

This is not what you asked about, but I generally view GCR interventions as highly relevant to current-generation and near-term health and wellbeing. When we launched the Global Catastrophic Risks Fund last year, we wrote in the prospectus:

The Fund’s grantmaking will take a balanced approach to existential and catastrophic risks. Those who take a longtermist perspective in principle put special weight on existential risks—those that threaten to extinguish or permanently curtail humanity’s potential—even where interventions appear less tractable. Not everyone shares this view, however, and people who care mostly about current generations of humanity may prioritize highly tractable interventions on global catastrophic risks that are not directly “existential”. In practice, however, the two approaches often converge, both on problems and on solutions. A common-sense approach based on simple cost-benefit analysis points us in this direction even in the near-term.

I like that the GCR framing is becoming more popular, e.g. with Open Philanthropy renaming their grant portfolio: 

We recently renamed our “Longtermism” grant portfolio to “Global Catastrophic Risks”. We think the new name better reflects our view that AI risk and biorisk aren’t only “longtermist” issues; we think that both could threaten the lives of many people in the near future.

I think: read a lot, interview a lot of people who are smarter (or more informed, connected, etc.) than I am about the problem, snowball sample from there, and then write a lot.

I wonder if FP's research director, @Matt_Lerner, has a better answer for me, or for FP researchers in general

China and India. Then generally excited about leveraging U.S. alliance dynamics and building global policy advocacy networks, especially for risks from technologies that seem to be becoming cheaper and more accessible, e.g. in synthetic biology

Not that I know of, but my colleage @jackva may have more to say here