Nuclear Threat Initiative II: Last Best Chance?
Since February 2021, I have been posting on Substack weekly entries on nuclear weapon matters—history, technology, and “secrets,” not current events—in You Might Want to Know. To see the titles of other entries you might find interesting, see the Archive.
One of the first public productions of the Nuclear Threat Initiative after its founding in 2001 was a film released in 2006 on HBO, a “docudrama,” called Last Best Chance. The name echoes the name of Butler’s Second Chance Foundation a bit, doesn’t it? The film was ominous and dramatic. It offered a fictional (but “based on fact,” whatever that means) account in which three different Al Qaeda groups manage to acquire by criminal means enough fissile fuel from states formerly in the Soviet orbit to make three crude fission bombs. The size of the Hiroshima bomb, say. That’s “crude” now when it comes to nuclear weapons.
It’s not that hard to make such a bomb, the film points out, if you can get hold of the fissile fuel.
Most of the bad guys are brown or black except for some brutal-looking Slavs. A handsome young white couple does get the last scene, however. With smirks on their faces, they coolly smuggle one of the bombs across the Canadian border into the United States, destined for—we don’t know where. Probably a city the size of Hiroshima or larger. A population of at least 250,000, let’s say. A lot to choose from there in our country.
At the end of the story-telling part of the film, the respected television journalist Tom Brokaw comes on to interview Sam Nunn and Richard Lugar. the two Senators who got the Cooperative Threat Reduction program going in 1989. The two tell Brokaw about the clear evidence that terrorists have been trying for years to acquire nuclear weapons or the means for making them.
The film doesn’t show a nuclear bomb actually exploding in an American city. But Sam Nunn does describe in graphic detail what would happen if just one Hiroshima-sized bomb did, followed by a threat of others being detonated in cities not yet identified. It would, he says, create cascading chaos and economic collapse throughout the United States.
As far as I know, the film didn’t exaggerate or misrepresent anything about the dangers or the effects of nuclear weapons. Something it also didn’t do was declare an ultimate commitment to eliminating nuclear dangers. Getting control of stores of fissile fuel and preventing nuclear terrorism in the United States would be a necessary piece of doing that but that couldn’t be finally what having a “last best chance” was about, could it? It certainly wasn’t what the Second Chance Foundation had finally been about. SCF had been about the complete elimination of the dangers. Which could be accomplished only with the complete elimination of the weapons.
Nunn says in the film, more than once, that we are in “a race between cooperation and catastrophe.” The film does give us an idea of what the “catastrophe” would be like but of what the “cooperation” would entail. More of a challenge there, I admit.
In the story-telling part of the film, the actor playing the president, Fred Thompson, asks, after it has become clear that he won’t be able to prevent the use of a nuclear weapon in the United States, “Why didn’t we close the door when we could?” Good question, isn’t it? Perhaps because, as Einstein had suggested in 1948, of our “mode of thinking”? Perhaps because we didn’t imagine what it would be like if, or when, others got nuclear weapons? Perhaps because we thought we’d be fine as long as we had nuclear weapons to “deter” attacks on us by those who had gotten the weapons? Especially if we were the only ones to have them?
Last Best Chance had been partially funded, the credits said, by Warren Buffett, who had also supported Butler’s Second Chance Foundation, by the Carnegie Corporation and the MacArthur Foundation. So NTI seemed to be getting itself on an even more solid financial foundation.
In its Annual Report for 2022, its twenty-second year of operation, the Nuclear Threat Initiative reported total expenditures of $19,440,424.
“Foundations” provided 87% of the funding.
“Government” provided” 8% (Not much, but what part of “government,” I wonder.)
Corporations” provided 3% (What “corporations”? Important to be careful here, isn’t it? We probably all know that some many corporations profit greatly from the nuclear enterprise. Are there any that favor eliminating nuclear weapons? Since NTI was also now focusing on chemical and biological weapons, I suppose some of this money could be coming from drug companies, who see opportunities in the biological weapons and pandemic area. Biology is not something that can be eliminated, except perhaps by nuclear weapons.)
“Individuals” provided just 2% of the funds but over 140 contributors are listed who gave more than $500.
Of the total received,
26% was spent on “Nuclear Materials Security and Global Nuclear Policy (about equally on those two separate items in the budget),
25% was spent on “Global Biological Policy and Programs.”
15% was spent on “Communications and Public Education." That could be things like the “Last Best Chance”
19% on “Management and General,” and
7% on “Fundraising.” Nothing outrageous there for a nonprofit. NTI clearly remains well funded.
Since February 2021, I have been posting on Substack weekly entries on nuclear weapon matters—history, technology, and “secrets,” not current events—in You Might Want to Know. To see the titles of other entries you might find interesting, see the Archive.