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JonahSinick comments on Will the world's elites navigate the creation of AI just fine? - Less Wrong
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Nuclear war would have to be really, really big to kill a majority of the population, and probably even if all weapons were used the fatality rate would be under 50% (with the uncertainty coming from nuclear winter). Note that most residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki survived the 1945 bombings, and that fewer than 60% of people live in cities.
It depends on the nuclear war. An exchange of bombs between India and Pakistan probably wouldn't end human life on the planet. However an all-out war between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R in the 1980s most certainly could have. Fortunately that doesn't seem to be a big risk right now. 30 years ago it was. I don't feel confident in any predictions one way or the other about whether this might be a threat again 30 years from now.
Why do you think this?
Because all the evidence I've read or heard (most of it back in the 1980s) agreed on this. Specifically in a likely exchange between the U.S. and the USSR the northern, hemisphere would have been rendered completely uninhabitable within days. Humanity in the southern hemisphere would probably have lasted somewhat longer, but still would have been destroyed by nuclear winter and radiation. Details depend on the exact distribution of targets.
Remember Hiroshima and Nagasaki were 2 relatively small fission weapons. By the 1980s the USSR and the US each had enough much bigger fusion bombs to individually destroy the planet. The only question was how many each would use in an exchange and where they target them.
This is mostly out of line with what I've read. Do you have references?
I'm not sure what the correct way to approach this would be. I think it may be something like comparing the number of people in your immediate reference class - depending on preference, this could be "yourself precisely" or "everybody who would make or have made the same observation as you" - and then ask "how would nuclear war affect the distribution of such people in that alternate outcome". But that's only if you give each person uniform weighting of course, which has problems of its own.
Sure, these things are subtle — my point was that the numbers who would have perished isn't very large in this case, so that under a broad class of assumptions, one shouldn't take the observed absence of nuclear conflict to be a result of survivorship bias.