How Henry Kissinger foresaw the power and potential of AI
When the late Henry Kissinger — who died a year ago, on Nov. 29 — published his essay “How the Enlightenment Ends” in June 2018, many were surprised that the elder statesman’s elder statesman had a view on artificial intelligence.
Kissinger had just turned 95. AI was not yet the hot topic it would become after OpenAI released ChatGPT in late 2022.
As Kissinger’s biographer, however, I wasn’t surprised that AI gripped his attention.
He had, after all, come to prominence in 1957 with a book about a new and world-changing technology.
“Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy” was a book so thoroughly researched that it won the approval even of Robert Oppenheimer, director of the Manhattan Project.
Contrary to his unwarranted reputation as a warmonger, Kissinger was strongly motivated throughout his adult life by the imperative to avoid World War III.
He understood that the technology of nuclear fission would make another world war an even greater conflagration.
Early in the book, Kissinger estimated the destructive effects of a 10-megaton bomb dropped on New York and then extrapolated that an all-out Soviet attack on the 50 largest US cities would kill between 15 and 20 million people and injure between 20 and 25 million.
A further 5 to 10 million would die from the effects of radioactive fallout.
Yet Kissinger’s youthful idealism did not make him a pacifist.
The question was not whether war could be avoided altogether by disarmament, but whether it was “possible to imagine applications of power less catastrophic than all-out thermonuclear war.”
It was on this basis that Kissinger advanced his doctrine of limited nuclear war.
Many people recoiled from Kissinger’s seemingly cold-blooded contemplation of a limited nuclear war.
Yet both superpowers went on to build battlefield or tactical nuclear weapons, following precisely the logic that Kissinger had outlined.
Indeed, such weapons exist to this day.
The Russian government has threatened to use them on more than one occasion since its invasion of Ukraine.
Unfortunately, today’s decisionmakers in Washington, DC, seem to have forgotten the lessons Kissinger taught them during the Cold War.
If one side threatens to use a nuclear weapon against the United States or one of its allies, we must always make it clear that we would not hesitate to retaliate in kind.
The amnesia of the Biden-Harris administration on the basics of nuclear deterrence has cost tens of thousands of Ukrainian lives.
Henry Kissinger never retired.
Such a man was hardly going to ignore one of the most consequential technological breakthroughs of his later life: the development and deployment of generative artificial intelligence.
Indeed, the task of understanding the implications of this nascent technology consumed a significant portion of Kissinger’s final years.
“Genesis,” Kissinger’s final book, co-authored with two eminent technologists, Craig Mundie and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, contains a stark warning about the dangers of an AI arms race.
“If . . . each human society wishes to maximize its unilateral position,” the authors write in the book published earlier this month, “then the conditions would be set for a psychological death-match between rival military forces and intelligence agencies, the likes of which humanity has never faced before.”
The “techno-optimists” of Silicon Valley may dismiss this as mere doom-mongering.
But the central problem of technological progress manifested itself in Henry Kissinger’s lifetime.
Nuclear fission was first observed in Berlin by two German chemists, Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann, in 1938.
The possibility of a nuclear chain reaction was the insight of the Hungarian physicist Leó Szilárd.
Yet it took less than four years for the Manhattan Project to build the first atomic bomb, whereas it was not until 1951 that the first nuclear power station was opened.
Today there are approximately 12,500 nuclear warheads in the world, and the number is rapidly rising as China adds to its nuclear arsenal.
By contrast, there are 436 nuclear reactors in operation.
Artificial intelligence is far different from nuclear fission.
But it would be a grave error to assume that we shall use this new technology more for productive than for potentially destructive purposes.
While it may not be widely realized—except, perhaps, by Elon Musk — the biggest risk Donald Trump’s administration will face is not Russian (or North Korean) missiles.
Nor is it Iranian-backed terrorists.
The danger is that Chinese scientists are currently conducting AI experiments as reckless as their “gain-of-function” research on coronaviruses five years ago.
Unlike in the 1950s, there is more than one arms race going on today — and the most dangerous may prove to be the AI arms race.
Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, is right to be hostile to the spread of DEI through the US armed services.
But those are not the capital letters he should be most worried about.
AI is a lot scarier than DEI. And our generation awaits its Kissinger: someone with the intellect to understand what this new technology means for our foreign policy.
Niall Ferguson is the Millbank Family senior fellow at the Hoover Institute and the author of “Kissinger, Volume 1: 1923-1968: The Idealist.”
