Sentinel minutes for week #44/2024: North Korea tests ICBM.

Status: Greenish 🟢

Top items:

• North Korea performed a banned ICBM test

• Upcoming US election has some tail risk, and might be followed by deadly protests

• H5N1 and monkeypox continue spreading

Geopolitics

In general, Geneva convention rules are being weakened, and civilians aren’t being shielded from the worst harms in Ukraine or Gaza.

Asia-Pacific

North Korea performed a banned ICBM test, and South Korea’s military intelligence agency told lawmakers Wednesday that North Korea has likely completed preparations for its seventh nuclear test and is close to test-firing a long-range missile capable of reaching the United States. Sentinel forecasters assigned a 19% chance (range: 15% to 30%) to North Korea doing a nuclear test in the next 6 months. Good Judgment Open gives around a 23% chance, (but isn’t quite independent, since it moved by the crowd reacting to one of our forecasts).

North Korea is likely to ask for nuclear technology from Russia in exchange for troops, South Korea says. This would mirror an agreement between Iran and Russia.

China has built a $50 billion military stronghold on Hainan Island in the South China Sea that could be used as a base during an invasion or blockade of Taiwan.

The US and China are fighting over dominance in the depths of the South China sea.

China has been building capabilities for making satellites capable of physically targeting other satellites and long-range ballistic missiles in space.

Europe

It turns out that some European countries depend on Russia’s Rosatom for nuclear fuel. European organizations are trying to coordinate long-term investment on alternatives.

There was a fire at BAE Systems' nuclear shipyard, where Britain's nuclear submarines are built, in Barrow-in-Furness in the United Kingdom. Two people were taken to hospital, but there is no nuclear risk. There was unsubstantiated speculation on social media that Russia had something to do with it.

Russia’s draft 2025 budget allocates one-third of total expenditure to military spending, the highest level since the Cold War. This massive increase in military spending is creating inflationary pressures in the economy and the government is being forced to raise taxes to finance its war in Ukraine. The budget also includes cuts in support for small businesses and education development programmes, indicating a shift in government priorities towards military expenditure.

Finland seized Russian assets over compensation linked to invasion of Crimea

Russia targets Kyiv in a drone attack.

Middle East

Israel ordered a whole Lebanese city evacuated, and dropped bombs in ‘lethal proximity’ of at least 19 Lebanese hospitals, CNN analysis finds. It also killed another senior Hamas official.

The Americas

United States

Forecasters haven’t updated their probabilities of various negative outcomes since last week: 36% chance to more than 10 deaths as a result of violent demonstrations conditional on the Associated Press declaring Trump’s opponent the victor; a 7% probability (range: 4%-10%) to Trump being inaugurated as President by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court on January 20, 2025 conditional on the Associated Press declaring his opponent the winner of the election, and slightly below 1% to a US civil war leading to over 1M deaths in the next ten years. Forecasters disagree somewhat about whether the risk varies depending on which candidate wins.

Beyond that, the New York Times has a somewhat uninformative profile on a policy group which might help with a potential Trump transition, the America First Policy Institute. And RFK might be in charge of the health portfolio in a Trump administration.

Latin America

Bolivia is in the midst of an armed insurrection.

Biorisk

H5N1

H5N1 (bird flu) has been found in pigs in the US for the first time, in pigs on a backyard (i.e., not commercial) farm with an infected poultry flock. This is very dangerous because pigs are susceptible to both human and avian flu viruses and hence can act as mixing vessels for flu viruses; the fear is that pigs can be infected with both H5N1 and human flu at the same time and that a new pandemic virus could eventually evolve and infect humans. Such a virus evolved over several decades in pigs and emerged to cause the 2009 flu pandemic.

H5N1 has been detected in Los Angeles wastewater, and it’s spreading fast across EU poultry.

An H5N1 isolate from a US dairy worker was given to ferrets in a lab, and a high dose of the virus was found to be lethal and transmissible in ferrets, and the infections were more lethal than those seen with a strain isolated from cattle previously. Scientists study flu viruses in ferrets because flu transmission and illnesses are similar in humans and ferrets. CIDRAP reports that,

To gauge respiratory transmission, the team placed healthy ferrets in cages next to ferrets that were infected with different doses of the virus from the dairy worker. From 17% to 33% of ferrets in adjacent cages were infected by respiratory droplets, suggesting that the virus from humans can spread among mammals by that route, but with limited efficiency. All directly infected ferrets died within 6 days

There have been three more human cases of bird flu among farm workers from Washington State, almost certainly due to exposure to poultry.

The number of sick days taken in Germany has been higher since Covid started and is not going down. This is one of many signals from multiple countries that illness burdens have increased since Covid emerged.

Monkeypox

The WHO activated the global emergency corps to deal with monkeypox. Implications unclear, as it seems more like a “reserve of experts that advise” and less like a “reserve of nurses and doctors”. 

The first case of Clade 1b mpox was detected in the United Kingdom.

Other biorisks

A pandemic fund has raised $2.8B for low and middle income countries to strengthen critical pandemic prevention, preparedness, and response capacities.

A person died of an imported Lassa infection in Iowa, US. While Lassa infections are not unusual, this case, among others, illustrates the ever-present risk from zoonotic infections worldwide.

The incidence of unusual cancers is on the rise, and doctors are wondering whether Covid is responsible. That a virus would cause an increase in cancer cases would not be at all unprecedented; many viruses have been shown to cause cancer.

Artificial Intelligence

Anthropic has published a policy proposal for the next 18 months, recommending Responsible Scaling Policies and risk evaluations. They write, in bold: “Governments should urgently take action on AI policy in the next eighteen months. The window for proactive risk prevention is closing fast.”

Chinese AI researchers developed a military-use AI model on top of Meta’s open sourced Llama model. 

Intel’s AI chips failed to meet sales expectations.

OpenAI launched ChatGPT search, positioning it to compete with Google Search.

US regulators are investigating colocation of data centers and power plants, and rejected an interconnection agreement for an Amazon data center directly connected to a nuclear power plant.

"Co-location arrangements of the type presented here present an array of complicated, nuanced and multifaceted issues, which collectively could have huge ramifications for both grid reliability and consumer costs," FERC Commissioner Mark Christie said in the order.

Climate

A study published in the Nature Communications shows that the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) slowed during the last interglacial period, when sea ice melted. This study makes us more interested in whether AMOC is likely to collapse in our future.

More than 200 people died in floods in Spain (and about 1000 are “disappeared”), in part because of insufficient warnings. Readers can see images of bridges collapsing, and overall very striking videos on social media. These floods highlight the importance of early warnings to populations at risk from weather disasters, which will happen increasingly frequently with climate change.

Floods are also causing less-publicized havoc in Africa.

Space

A Boeing satellite exploded into 500 pieces. The worst case scenario in events like this is Kessler syndrome. However, this particular satellite can’t cause this—Kessler syndrome is a problem on low earth orbit, which is very cluttered, and not so much on medium and high Earth orbits, which are far less cluttered and so can’t start such a chain reaction. Geostationary orbit, where this explosion happened, is a special case: it has a ton of satellites, but unlike LEO they are all going in the same direction and speed, and their relative velocities are thus low, and collisions shouldn’t cause a snowballing effect.