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ShardPhoenix comments on What did governments get right? Gotta list them all! - Less Wrong Discussion
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I think we have to take anthropic effects into account for this one - even if there is total nuclear war in most possible worlds, only in the ones where it doesn't happen (perhaps by luck) will most of us still be around to give anyone credit for stopping it.
I wouldn't give anthropics too much credit here. The sources I've read place direct fatalities from total nuclear war in the hundreds of millions, with deaths from secondary effects (mostly global disruption of food supplies) possibly in the low billions: an unprecedented scale of fatality, but not an extinction-level event.
(Note however that the OTA study linked through the FAS site took place in the late Seventies, a relative low before the Reagan-era arms buildup.)