Sam Winter-Levy
The rapid development of artificial intelligence in recent years has led many analysts to suggest that it will upend international politics and the military balance of power. Some have gone so far as to claim, in the words of the technologists Dan Hendrycks, Eric Schmidt, and Alexandr Wang, that advanced AI systems could “establish one state’s complete dominance and control, leaving the fate of rivals subject to its will.”
AI is no doubt a transformative technology, one that will strengthen the economic, political, and military foundations of state power. But the winner of the AI race will not necessarily enjoy unchallenged dominance over its major competitors. The power of nuclear weapons, the most significant invention of the last century, remains a major impediment to the bulldozing change brought by AI. So long as systems of nuclear deterrence remain in place, the economic and military advantages produced by AI will not allow states to fully impose their political preferences on one another. Consider that the U.S. economy is almost 15 times larger than that of Russia, and almost 1,000 times larger than that of North Korea, yet Washington struggles to get Moscow or Pyongyang to do what it wants, in large part because of their nuclear arsenals.
Some analysts have suggested that AI advances could challenge this dynamic. To undermine nuclear deterrence, AI would need to knock down its central pillar: a state’s capacity to respond to a nuclear attack with a devastating nuclear strike of its own, what is known as second-strike capability. AI technology could plausibly make it easier for a state to destroy a rival’s entire nuclear arsenal in one “splendid first strike” by pinpointing the locations of nuclear submarines and mobile launchers. It could also prevent a rival from launching a retaliatory strike by disabling command-and-control networks.
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