The Nuclear Threat Initiative: The "New 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.
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
Even if we could, by some miracle, reverse the course on which we are set, unless we change our way of thinking, of being in the world – the way that is destroying us as we speak – it would all be in vain. Iain McGilchrist, from Home Page on YouTube’s Channel McGilchrist, retrieved 12/8/23
While I was looking back through the twenty-year history of the Nuclear Threat Initiative, I confess I sometimes found myself wondering whether NTI still embraced the goal of its founder Ted Turner and of NTI’s precursor, George Lee Butler’s Second Chance Foundation—the elimination of nuclear weapons. Not the growth and “more programs” that they could report. Not just, in the words of the motto on NTI’s current website, “a safer world,” but the elimination of nuclear weapons. Not a mere reduction of nuclear dangers, by lowering warhead totals or doing something like taking our ICBMs off hair-trigger alert, but the elimination of nuclear weapons—not something that could be expected to happen overnight, of course, but if committed to, something that would be worked toward unremittingly, with elimination always being seen in any “arms control” measures as the first among equals, and with every “arms control” measure assessed in terms of its contribution toward achieving the goal of: elimination.
At the governmental level, no commitment of that kind was evident in 2021. Not since 2009, when President Obama declared “clearly and unequivocally” America’s commitment to “the peace and security of a world free of nuclear weapons.” tTK
Finally, in the Nuclear Threat Initiative’s Annual Report for 2021, which celebrated the first 20 years of NTI, I found the new co-director Ernest Moniz quoted as saying,
Well, 2041 [that is, 20 years down the road from 2021] is getting pretty close to 2045. I single out 2045 because it’s the 100th anniversary of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and it is a very appropriate aspiration that we would like to achieve NTI’s ultimate goal of seeing the nuclear weapon risk eliminated on that kind of a timeframe.
There it is. Elimination. As “NTI’s ultimate goal.” With a deadline—aspirational, of course—of 2045, the “100th anniversary of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.” The 100th anniversary of the only use—so far—of nuclear weapons in combat.
But I noticed in Ernest Moniz’s statement that he referred not to the elimination of nuclear weapons but the elimination of “nuclear weapon risk.” Might some people still think, as President Reagan had, that it would be possible to eliminate “nuclear weapon risk” by coming up with technologically sophisticated defensive systems through something like the failed Strategic Defense Initiative?
President Reagan had bought into that fantasy and it had made him walk away from the proposal Mikhail Gorbachev made at their summit in Reykjavik in 1986 that they simply eliminate the weapons. Flat out. In ten years, he proposed.
If the Nuclear Threat Initiative can figure out a way to eliminate “nuclear weapon risk” without eliminating nuclear weapons, I’m for it. I myself can’t see how you’d do that. President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative sure hadn’t done it. It had spent billions and billions of dollars trying, no one seems to be able to say exactly how many billions of dollars. Lots of dollars are still being spent on such programs. We hear from the defense contractors involved that progress is being made.
Also, can we just stop saying “ultimately,” or “eventually,” or “one day”? Let’s just say it: we are committed to eliminating nuclear weapons (or nuclear dangers, if you like, which can’t be eliminated without eliminating the weapons). That, and nothing less, is what we are committed to. And can we just start asking about every “reduction” or “security” measure how we see it contributing not just to supposed “security,” as the seventy thousand nuclear warheads we and the Soviets had in our stockpiles in 1989 were supposedly doing, but to elimination? If something isn’t contributing to elimination, can we just say so, and keep trying to come up with something that might?
Here’s a very big issue that is almost always glossed over. It’s an issue that had finally come into the ken of the four former Cold Warriors—Sam Nunn, George Shultz, William Perry, and Henry Kissinger—who on January 4, 2007 had published that surprising op-ed in the Wall Street Journal where they had for the first time argued for “a world free of nuclear weapons.” In the fourth op-ed they published on the subject, on March 7, 2011, the four had recognized that such a world would not be simply “today’s world minus the weapons.”
They hadn’t gone on, though, to say just how they thought “today’s world” would have to be different.
Has this occurred to you? For the goal of elimination to be achieved, more than the elimination of the weapons themselves would be required. Elimination could be achieved only in a world that made elimination possible.
What kind of world would that be? How would it be different from “today’s world”?
It is no doubt easier to say what that world would not be like, not like “today’s world,” for a start. But how not?
In NTI’s Annual Report for 2021, Ernest Moniz mentioned a new program in NTI called Horizon 2045 for which NTI seemed to have high hopes. In 2021, the program was just getting going. The idea for it seemed to have come from a new non-profit group called N Square. N Square had been founded in 2014 to address “wicked” problems, starting with the elimination of nuclear weapons. They had by now adopted a technique called “systems thinking” as a way of trying to address such problems and what they called the current “polycrisis,” meaning not just the threat of nuclear war but the dangers posed by other threats, not just to individual nations, but to all of us. Like pandemics and climate change.
“To confront this challenge,” said the Horizon 2045 website, in 2021,
some policymakers and thought-leaders are working to better account for complexity in their problem-solving by incorporating a set of processes, methods, and practices known as systems thinking. This approach aims to bring about systems change by identifying the structures, historical patterns, and behaviors that undergird policy problems and shifting the conditions that hold these structures in place.
“By studying a system as a whole,” said Isabelle Williams, team lead for Horizon 2045 at NTI, “we can identify key leverage points where a small change—or series of changes—could catalyze a broader shift in the system.”
Well, maybe. But “systems thinking” is another technology, right? Doesn’t this “vision" purport to “solve a problem” while leaving the world as it is?
In January 2024, the Managing Director, Erika Gregory, posted the following New Year’s message on N Square’s listserv:
At Horizon 2045 we are developing new tools and approaches that deepen our collective understanding of what that change could look like, whether it’s mapping the behaviors and beliefs holding stuck systems in place, or finding new ways to visualize and interact with signal of change shaping the future, or considering the ways in which our mental models—the “small scale models” we carry in our heads about how the world works—will be challenged by the changes we experience.
Here’s one of the tools this creative and energetic group has produced, something they call a “foresight radar”, which they launched in October 2023:
It’s clear that this is a committed group, committed not just to doing something about nuclear weapons but about the “polycrisis” of which nuclear weapons are an aspect.
But I’ve come to think that most efforts so far to address of our “polycrisis” share a common defect. And it seems to me highly doubtful that this common defect can be addressed by the technique of “systems analysis.” Or by any “technique.” Or “tool.” Or “map.” Or “model.”
It is more likely, I think, that the defect has something to do with a belief that a “technique,” or “tool,” or “system,” or exercise of “will” is what will get us to the elimination of nuclear weapons and to a world that will allow the “polycrisis” to be meaningfully addressed. And get us to what Einstein had said was needed: another mode of thinking.
…I want to make it clear that for me the goal of eliminating nuclear weapons as legitimate instruments of national power is not an end point, it is a way point. George Lee Butler, in a speech to the Lawyers Alliance for World Security, November 22, 1998.
[Move this—TK Our dominant value – sometimes I fear our only value – has, very clearly, become that of power. This aligns us with a brain system, that of the left hemisphere, the raison d’être of which is to control and manipulate the world. But not to understand it: that, for evolutionary reasons that I explain, has come to be more the raison d’être of our – more intelligent, in every sense – right hemisphere. Unfortunately the left hemisphere, knowing less, thinks it knows more. It is a good servant, but a ruinous – a peremptory – master. And the predictable outcome of assuming the role of master is the devastation of all that is important to us – or should be important, if we really know what we are about.]
Even if we could, by some miracle, reverse the course on which we are set, unless we change our way of thinking, of being in the world – the way that is destroying us as we speak – it would all be in vain. Iain McGilchrist, from Home Page on Channel McGilchrist, retrieved 12/8/23
The left hemisphere has dismantled the universe and is unable to put it back together again. Without a radically different understanding we just can’t carry on. Iain McGilchrist, The Matter with Things (2021 p. 1328)
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 that might be of interest, see the Archive.
Next: The (Cold War) Mentality: What is It? What Isn’t It?