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solaire comments on A Parable of Elites and Takeoffs - Less Wrong
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The only one I've personally read is Herman Kahn's On Thermonuclear War, which oversimplifies a lot and generally tries to paint matters as optimistically as possible; as well, people from that era like Samuel Cohen in his memoirs describe Kahn as willing to fudge numbers to make their scenarios look better.
Personally, I am not optimistic. Remember the formulation of existential risk: not just extinction, but also the permanent curtailment of human potential. So if industrialized civilization collapsed permanently, that would be a serious x-risk almost up there with extinction itself. I agree that I don't think nuclear war is likely to immediately cause human extinction, but if it destroys industrialized civilization, then it's setting us up to actually be wiped out over the coming millennia or millions of years by a fluke pandemic or asteroid or any of the usual natural x-risks.
Coal, oil, surface metals, and many other resources are effectively impossible to extract with low-tech levels like say the 1800s. (Imagine trying to frack or deepsea mine or extract tar with 1800s metallurgy or anything.) Historically, we see that entire continents can go for millennia on end with little meaningful change economically; much of Africa might as well not be in the same world, for all the good progress has done it. Intellectual traditions and scholarship can become corrupted into meaningless repetition of sacred literature (how much genuine innovation took place in China from AD 0 to AD 1800, compared to its wealth and large intelligentsia? why do all acupuncture trials 'succeed' in China and Japan when it's shown to be worthless placebo in Western trials?) We still don't know why the Industrial & Scientific Revolutions took place in Western Europe starting around the 1500s, when there had been urbanized civilizations for millennia and China in every way looked better, so how could we be confident that if humanity were reduced to the Dark Ages we'd quickly recover? Brief reparable interruptions in globalized supply chains cause long-lasting - we still haven't recovered to the trendline of hard drive prices from the Thai floods, and that was just flooding, nothing remotely like a countervalue nuke against Bangkok knocking out a good chunk of Thai business & financial infrastructure. Experience/learning curve effects mean that high efficiencies are locked up in the heads and hands and physical arrangement of existing capital, so plants cannot simply be replaced overnight, the expertise has to be developed from scratch. Complex civilizations can simply collapse and disperse back into the low-tech agrarian societies from whence they sprung (I'm thinking particularly of the case-studies in Tainter's Collapse).
Of course, we can't yet name an industrialized civilization that collapsed, but it's not like it's been a thing all that long - the Roman Empire lasted a lot longer than the Industrial Revolution has, but nevertheless, we know how that ended.
It feels like we have talked past each other given this and responses to other comments.
I do not think this really addressed a core misconception shaping the debate or a best a contradiction of historical expert analysis. Would you call it "industrial collapse" if, following a full scale nuclear war, present day Australia was still standing a month later with little military destruction nor human casualties?
I am not directly an expert in the field and climate science in particular has advanced a lot compared to historical research, on all topics not just nuclear winter, but I have read some different authors. Also to the point, the sheer volume of expert work characterized at best by conflicting opinions should you accept the most pessimistic nuclear warfare predictions is worth considering. Sagan and Turco and others repeatedly collaborated on several high profile works and the state of expert science I think could be accurately said to be considered to have advanced over time.
See for example: http://www.atmos.washington.edu/~ackerman/Articles/Turco_Nuclear_Winter_90.pdf
This particular paper doesn't discuss, say, military strategy other than very broad consensus, eg. both sides would favor Northern Hemisphere targets, though see a ton of cited and other sources. Even conditionally overcoming, for the purpose of hypothetical consideration, the lower prior probability of certain full scale military conflicts, direct, targeted destruction of more than about 20% of the world population as a military and strategic outcome just wasn't feasible, ever. This as a popular misconception might be readily dismissed by those of us here, but recognize that large amounts of past research was on fully trying to understand, admittedly we still don't completely, subsequent climate and ecological effects. The latter are the only real x-risk concern from a technological and natural science standpoint. A few degrees Celsius of temperature change globally and other havoc is not nothing but most predictions indicated low risk of a real extinction event. Much of the world would have nominally go on without the US and USSR and losses suffered by their respective allies, and by pretty much everyone's inspection it's not like those who survived would be all impovershed 3rd worlders who could never recover.
It is a stretch to describe predictions and understanding at times in the past, even "1980 Australia survives intact, with some climate and ecological repercussions" as "industrial civilization completely collapses." Those two statements are not equivalent at all. The former prediction might have been incorrect but it existed.
Clearly there are reasons to consider prior study on the matter less than ideal, experts lacking time or funding or facing political pressure. Though, saying that experts attempted to study the issue at the time and got it wrong is different from ignoring it and from others rejecting a correct conclusion by the experts. Very few expert predictions leaned in the direction of x-risk as considered here - not just immediate near extinction but also "permanent curtailment of potential," at least when putting nuclear warfare and low if uncertain nuclear winter predictions on the same scale as other x-risks.
I assume you mean here if Australia escaped any direct attack? Sure. The lesson of I Am A Pencil - no one person (or country) knows how to make a pencil. Australia is heavily integrated into the world economy: to caricature, they mine iron for China, and in exchange they get everything else. Can Australia make an Intel chip fab using only on-island resources? Could it even maintain such a chip fab? Can Australia replace the pharmaceutical factories of the USA and Switzerland using only on-island resources? Where do the trained specialists and rare elements come from? Consider the Great Depression: did Australia escape it? If it cannot escape a simple economic slowdown because it is so highly intertwined, it is not going to escape the disruption and substantial destruction of almost the entire scientific-industrial-technological complex of the Western world. Australia would immediately be thrown into dire poverty and its advanced capabilities will begin decaying. Whether Australia becomes a new Tanzania of technology loss will depend on how badly mauled the rest of the world is, though, I would guess.
An instantaneous loss of 10-20% of population and destruction of major urban centers is pretty much unprecedented. The few examples I can think of similar levels of population loss, like the Mongols & Iran or the Spanish & New World, are not promising.
But none of those countries were responsible for the Industrial or Scientific Revolutions. Humanity would survive... much as it always has. That's the problem.
I've read this paragraph 3 times and I still don't know what you're talking about. You're being way too vague about what experts or what predictions you're talking about or what you're responding to or how it connects to your claims about Australia.