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To be fair to doomers, this is a needle that was thread by scientists before. The fact that there is a strong taboo against nuclear weapons today is for the most part the result of a deliberate conspiracy of scientists to make nuclear weapons special, associated with total war and to think the world in terms of the probability of this total war to make their use irrational.
That reading of their use is not a foregone conclusion from the nature of the destruction they wreak. But rather a matter of policy.
And to apply the analogy to this, it did require both that those scientists actually shape nukes into a superweapon and that they denounce it and its uses utterly.
I see a lot of doomer advocacy as an attempt to manifest AI's own Operation Candor.
From my reading of Nina Tannenwald’s The Nuclear Taboo: The United States and the Non-Use of Nuclear Weapons Since 1945, it appears that while the scientists were generally opposed to widespread use of nukes, and while they did play a large part in raising public consciousness around the dangerous health effects of radiation, they ultimately had minimal influence on the development of the international nuclear taboo compared to domestic policy makers, Soviet propaganda efforts, and third world politics.
According to that book at least, far from trying to stigmatize nukes, the Eisenhower administration was very much trying to counter their stigmatization and present them as just another part of conventional warfare, due to the huge cost savings involved. Seen in this light, Operation Candor was more of a public relations campaign around justifying the administration’s spending on nukes rather than a way to stop nuclear proliferation.
So if history is any indication, the scientists can make all the noise they want, but it’s not going to matter unless it aligns with the self-interests of major institutional stakeholders.
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