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Nuclear War: An LLM Scenario

32 points by huey77

by roxolotl

1 subcomments

We don’t need agi or superintelligence for these things to be dangerous. We just need to be willing to hand over our decision making to a machine.
And of course a human can make a wrong call too. In this scenario that’s what is happening. And of course we should bring all of our tools to bear when it comes to evaluating nuclear threats.
But that doesn’t make it less concerning that we’ve now got machines capable of linguistic persuasion in that toolset.

by laughingcurve

0 subcomment

https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.17192
Shall We Play a Game? Language Models for Open-ended Wargames
Wargames are simulations of conflicts in which participants' decisions influence future events. While casual wargaming can be used for entertainment or socialization, serious wargaming is used by experts to explore strategic implications of decision-making and experiential learning. In this paper, we take the position that Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems, such as Language Models (LMs), are rapidly approaching human-expert capability for strategic planning -- and will one day surpass it. Military organizations have begun using LMs to provide insights into the consequences of real-world decisions during _open-ended wargames_ which use natural language to convey actions and outcomes. We argue the ability for AI systems to influence large-scale decisions motivates additional research into the safety, interpretability, and explainability of AI in open-ended wargames. To demonstrate, we conduct a scoping literature review with a curated selection of 100 unclassified studies on AI in wargames, and construct a novel ontology of open-endedness using the creativity afforded to players, adjudicators, and the novelty provided to observers. Drawing from this body of work, we distill a set of practical recommendations and critical safety considerations for deploying AI in open-ended wargames across common domains. We conclude by presenting the community with a set of high-impact open research challenges for future work

by motbus3

1 subcomments

This is not unlikely. This is actually likely. The instructions for those agents is to find signals that prove there is an attack. Llms are steered to do what they are requested. They will interpret the signals a strongly as possible. They will omit counter evidence to achieve their objective. They will distort analysis to find their objective.
This has been everyone's llm problem daily. How is not that clear yet?

by chuckadams

2 subcomments

Would you like to play a game?

by rglover

0 subcomment

The big problem here is determining how vigilant those in command are about vetting the AI's responses. This feels like one of those systems that works great until someone vaporizes a hallucinated target that was actually civilians or unintended targets. This should be mitigated by having a MITM, but still. Risky. Humans make mistakes, too, and they're inclined to just "believe what the computer says," so as much as I'd love to believe this ends with a white picket fence scene, my instincts are screaming "dig a bunker, homie."

by __lain__

0 subcomment

Every once in a while I'll send a false positive security alert to Claude, one that isn't even very subtle its just obviously incorrectly flagged, and every time it freaks out and tells me I have an active intruder and it actually gets itself worked up in a panic.
I have high hopes for our future.

by adrianmsmith

0 subcomment

> Replacing human hesitation with machine confidence removes the one safeguard that has prevented nuclear war since 1945. Until militaries implement documented human authorisation...we are blindly automating our own destruction
In the scenario described there literally is a human in the loop: the president is a human?

by thomascountz

0 subcomment

See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47248385
Anthropic's AI tool Claude central to U.S. campaign in Iran...

by mdlxxv

0 subcomment

A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.
How about a nice game of chess?

by user2722

1 subcomments

No-one got fired for ~buying IBM~ following a statistical-based text output.

by twoodfin

1 subcomments

Since the beginning of the nuclear age, literally billions of dollars have been spent paying incredibly smart people to model all aspects of nuclear war, including the chain of escalation under uncertainty.
Not to discount the importance of this risk, but we’re not likely to sleepwalk into it, barring a collapse in strategic & operational competence in planning (yeah, yeah) that would make MANY risks dangerously severe.

by burnt-resistor

0 subcomment

How about a nice game of chess?

by Simulacra

0 subcomment

Reading this I was reminded of this story:
"At the Abyss: An Insider's History of the Cold War" recounted that the United States added a Trojan horse to gas pipeline control software that the Soviet Union obtained from a company in Canada. According to the author, when the components were deployed on a Trans-Siberian gas pipeline, the Trojan horse led to a huge explosion. He wrote: "The pipeline software that was to run the pumps, turbines and valves was programmed to go haywire, to reset pump speeds and valve settings to produce pressures far beyond those acceptable to the pipeline joints and welds. The result was the most monumental non-nuclear explosion and fire ever seen from space."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At_the_Abyss

by user2722

1 subcomments

I'd posit the faster we feed LLM exhisting nuclear crisis and invented, dissimilar to its training corpus, nuclear scenarios, the better we will know how wrong they can be. Fear-mongering isn't lucrative, isn't dopamine triggering, isn't actionable, doesn't look good on the resume, so it's tipically ignored.

by aaron695

0 subcomment

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