AI Does Not Need a ‘Nuclear Freeze’

Foreign adversaries frequently manipulate American public opinion and policy toward their own interests by exploiting organic American concerns. The Soviets did that with American nuclear weapons and missile defense. Now, communist China is doing it with AI.

The recent scare campaign surrounding AI bears an eerie resemblance to the Soviet-sponsored “nuclear freeze” operation four decades ago. In the early 1980s, President Ronald Reagan vowed to modernize America’s aging nuclear weapons arsenal and build a national defense against Soviet missiles. He threw cold water on a discredited arms-control process and alarmed much of the public with his rhetoric. Some of the nuclear concerns were genuine, but some were based on falsehoods the Soviets fanned. The alarm opened the door for Moscow to channel many Americans’ valid concerns into a full-blown active measures campaign to hamstring U.S. technological advances.

The nuclear freeze campaign would have had the U.S. and USSR freeze their nuclear weapons development at the levels of that time. But most knew that the Kremlin would continue to build regardless; the urge to “do something” was intense. Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev then floated the possibility of a nuclear freeze with Reagan. Reagan declined, and the United States won.

The call to pace, or even pause, frontier AI development appeals to a similar logic. AI development can spin out of control. Time is short. Somebody must do something. Rather than have the top AI companies regulate themselves and not build products they cannot control, some AI leaders called for the functional equivalent of a nuclear freeze.

But any meaningful global pacing would require verifiable Chinese cooperation. This is the fatally flawed Cold War arms-control thinking reminiscent of the nuclear freeze.

The cast of characters is similar, too. Senator Bernie Sanders announced legislation to “temporarily pause” AI, ban certain advancements, and build a government oversight bureaucracy. Such a plan would hand China the win. Sanders, who describes himself as a Democratic Socialist, lent his name to countless Cold War Soviet-era measures. As mayor of Burlington, Vt., in 1982, he pushed the nuclear freeze.

In September, former President Barack Obama reposted an item on X about an initiative, Project Blueprint, “to rebuild bonds between leaders in the artificial intelligence sector and Democrats who are demanding new rules to regulate.” Obama endorsed Project Blueprint to set “stronger standards and guidelines for AI development.” Back in the nuclear freeze days, Obama wrote U.S. disarmament material, echoing Soviet active-measures themes, in the Columbia University student newspaper.

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