The Nuclear Threat Initiative: The Will but No Way?
Since February 2021, I have been posting on Substack weekly entries on nuclear weapon matters—history, technology, and “secrets”—in You Might Want to Know. To see other entries that might be of interest, see the Archive.
T]he unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking and thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe. Albert Einstein, 1946
When it comes to nuclear weapons and whether or not we want to commit to eliminating them, the obstacle may be neither ignorance nor complacency.
Maybe we have made it our business to learn what we can about nuclear weapons—their effects, their history, the plans we’ve made over the years for their use. Maybe we’ve been reading the weekly postings in You Might Want to Know. After that, ignorance will no longer be in the picture for us. What might be stopping people like us from committing to the elimination of nuclear weapons?
The Nuclear Threat Initiative’s 2021 Annual Report said that to help with its project of building the “political will” to eliminate the weapons, NTI had undertaken something they called “narrative research.” In it, the Annual Report said, their researchers had found
that while the U.S. public already overwhelmingly wants to live in a world without nuclear weapons, half do not believe it’s possible, and less than a third believe they have any role to play. One of the biggest lessons from the research: If you don’t include a positive vision of a future in your message, you fail to persuade audiences.
Are there any surprises for you there? NTI’s narrative research had shown that complacency is not the obstacle to committing to eliminate nuclear weapons. The U.S. public wants “overwhelmingly” to live in a world free of nuclear weapons. But more than half of us don’t think it is possible bring about such a world. And less than a third of us believe we might have any role to play in bringing such a world about.
That state of affairs is no accident, is it? From the beginning of the nuclear arms race, our political leaders had taken the line that it wasn’t possible to achieve a world free of the weapons. The only sensible response to our invention of them was more of them and better delivery systems. Furthermore, only a few of us, what came to be referred to as a “nuclear priesthood,” could be entrusted with “the secrets” and consider ourselves entitled to deliberate the matter. In this way we were “infantilized,” as someone had put it.
Some of our scientific leaders, Niels Bohr and J. Robert Oppenheimer among them, saw the possibility for a world free of the weapons. Niels Bohr was, finally, ignored, and later Oppenheimer had his security clearance revoked in a deeply dubious proceeding, as many of us know after this year’s hit movie called Oppenheimer, if we didn’t before.
After the Cold War ended in 1991, the secrecy was lifted some. But we were still in the habit of thinking it wasn’t our business, that other wiser people were taking care of things.
NTI’s narrative researchers concluded, according the Annual Report, that what was lacking here in terms of generating political will was a “positive vision.”
The visions we’d been given in the Nuclear Threat Initiative’s movies Last Best Chance and Nuclear Tipping Point, and in the made-for-TV movie The Day After that President Reagan was deeply affected by in 1983, were powerful visions. But none, I think, could be said to have offered a “positive vision.”
Those films had wanted, it seemed, to scare us into action. President Reagan, who wrote in his journal that he had been deeply disturbed by his advance viewing of The Day After, did not take action right away. He was able to take action only after after he met in Reykjavik, Iceland with Mikhail Gorbachev in October 1986. In that meeting, Gorbachev proposed to him the complete elimination of the weapons. In only ten years.
The Day After wasn’t broadcast on Soviet state television until 1987. But Gorbachev himself had probably been scared a few months earlier when, in April 1986, there had been a disastrous accident at their nuclear power plant in Chernobyl. The reactors there had exploded and nuclear fuel had melted down and dangerous radioactivity had spread over a large area of the country, which is something that would happen much more severely in a country attacked with nuclear weapons. That might have gotten him over the hump and thinking that something needed to be done to eliminate nuclear weapons.
Even at Reykjavik, President Reagan hadn’t been able to embrace the goal of elimination that Gorbachev laid before him. Instead he had chosen to hold out for building a hugely expensive defensive system that he’d been told by some of his advisors would render nuclear weapons “impotent and obsolete.” That particular “vision” had turned out to be a delusion that even now, 43 years and many billions of dollars later, hasn’t come close to being realized. Some people still seem to think it might. Money is still being spent.
What kind of “positive vision” would be enough to overcome the fact that half of us can’t see that it’s possible to eliminate nuclear weapons and only a third of us think we might have any role in doing so?
If you see a place you want to get to but can’t see how you could do it, your “will” to get there might not last long. On the other hand, it does seem to be true that if you can’t see, or imagine, a place you want to get to, you certainly won’t have the will to get there.
“Without vision, the people perish,” says Proverbs 29:18 in the King James version of the Christian Bible. The word translated here as “vision” can apparently also be translated as “revelation.” The word translated as “perish” can also be translated as “act without wisdom.” So it could be “without revelation, the people act without wisdom.”
Let’s stick with “vision” and “perish” but recognize that we are not talking about a vision, a clearly defined thing, like a map or a photograph, or about “perishing” as ceasing to exist as a thing. “Perish” comes from an Old French word that can mean “to be lost.” We can get lost without ceasing to exist.
How do we get the needed “vision” (or revelation)? In many religious traditions, vision is not imagined as something we can will into existence but as something that comes to us because we have, as a first step, taken away the obstacles to it, opened ourselves to it. Doing this will not make it happen but will no longer keep it from happening.
Many wisdom traditions hold that we must in some ways make ourselves ready for this kind of vision before it can come to us. Vision might, then, come only to those who long for it, even as they realize that they will never be able to grasp it fully the way we may be able to grasp things, or to fully understand it.
Those not disposed to any religion might find the way to such a vision, I think, in what some have said about the power of imagination and intuition. Not fantasy, mind you, but imagination. Not guesswork, but intuition. Fantasizing, pretending, gambling—none may partake of imagination and intuition.
The Beatle’s John Lennon wrote a song called “Imagine” that was very popular. “Imagine all the people,” the song says, “livin’ life in peace.” It adds, “you might say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one. I hope some day you’ll join us, and the world will be as one.”
Is that a fantasy? It is not always easy to tell. In any case, it imagines something that more than one of us longs for.
Here are some other statements about the powers of imagination that seem to me to be food for thought here.
“Imagination is more important than knowledge,” said Einstein. “For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination encircles the world.”
Iain McGilchrist wrote the following about imagination his book, The Matter with Things (2021):
In imagination . . . we experience intimations of matters that are glimpsed but only partly seen; our conscious minds obscure them. They resist explicit formulation, because thereby they become something else. This tentative, but rapt, attraction toward something that is not cognised, but at some deep level re-cognised, is not the work of fantasy but of imagination. Imagination is far from certain, of course; but the biggest mistake we could make would be never to trust it—never to believe in it—for fear of being mistaken. For truth requires imagination. It alone can put us in touch with aspects of reality to which our habits of thought have rendered us blind. It leads not to an escape from reality, but a sudden seeing into its depths, so that reality is for the first time truly present…. (p. 768)
Truth requires imagination? Is that what you think?
“Political will” can make important things happen. But is it possible that “political will,” or any other kind of “will,” will have a limited role, maybe even a harmful role, in achieving the kind of vision that, whatever its apparent limitations, might have the power to bring to us a world free of nuclear weapons?
Has the Nuclear Threat Initiative seen a role for imagination? It seems they have. In NTI’s Annual Report for 2022, the President and Chief Operating Officer Joan Rohlfing is quoted as saying,
One of the criticisms we frequently hear is that ‘A world without nuclear weapons simply is not possible. We could never verify that others are not cheating.’ I think that suffers from a complete failure of imagination.
Is that it? We are failing to imagine what is needed?
How do we stop failing at that?
Next: The Way of Systems Analysis?
Since February 2021, I have been posting on Substack weekly entries on nuclear weapon matters—history, technology, and “secrets”—in You Might Want to Know. To see the titles of other entries that might be of interest, see the Archive.