A Look Back on our 2024 Symposium: Ploughshares + Horizon 2045 Partnership in Action

January 13, 2025
Last September, Horizon 2045 and Ploughshares co-hosted “Security & the Future,” a three-day symposium designed to promote long-term thinking about intersections between nuclear challenges and other global threats to human and planetary security. More than 100 colleagues from civil society, philanthropy, the private sector, and government attended the symposium, engaging in provocative cross-issue conversations focused on surfacing novel opportunities for innovation and collaboration.
The event was also a milestone in the partnership between Horizon 2045 and Ploughshares, which is built around instilling long-term thinking, systems thinking, and cross-issue awareness and collaboration as foundational field-wide capacities.
A key goal of the event was to inspire new intersecting lines of thinking about how we collectively tackle our most pressing planetary challenges, including nuclear weapons threats. “The nuclear field tends to focus on what’s urgent. Where is the next threat? Who is the next bad actor?” said Ploughshares President Emma Belcher in her opening night remarks. She warned that this keeps us focused only on what is immediate, rather than planning for the future. “We’ve got to disrupt that. We’ve got to rethink and recharge our strategies. We need to innovate, we need to think differently, we need to make different connections.”
At the center of the symposium was an all-day workshop involving Ploughshares’ Nuclear Futures Fellows, a cohort of 10 emerging and established leaders in the nuclear field. They worked alongside nuclear practitioners and thought leaders from other fields to begin making these new connections. Together, they considered three divergent scenarios for the year 2030, surfacing cross-issue implications that were common across all their issue spaces. Through our investment in this fellowship, we are empowering the fellows to become young leaders in the nuclear field and beyond. The diversity in perspectives will enrich the field for years to come. The Ploughshares Field Building team is working to shape the nuclear field into a welcoming, healthy environment for young professionals.
The workshop also served as an opportunity for us to engage intersectional thought partners, including those in fields such as medicine, climate, and AI. Through investing in intersectional approaches, we hope to facilitate collaborative efforts to address existential risks.
The thought leaders included Nahid Bhadelia, Founding Director at Boston University Center on Emerging Infectious Diseases; Johan Bergenas, Senior VP of Oceans at World Wildlife Fund; Mike Hartnett, VP of Business Development at PowerLight Technologies; Hamza Tariq Chaudhry, AI and CBRN Policy Specialist at Future of Life Institute; and Danielle McLaughlin, a legal scholar and practicing attorney who leads the Horizon 2045 Legal Strategies Initiative, which is also supported by Ploughshares.
“What we saw in these sessions, and across the symposium, was the power of building the field from within by encouraging trusting and collegial relationships that are rooted at the intersection of nuclear issues and other compelling threats,” said Horizon 2045 President Erika Gregory.
The symposium also featured a salon discussion among philanthropists and funders about what building new connections and collaborations for addressing global threats and polycrises might look like in the philanthropic context. At a time when the future of arms control is uncertain, we see it as a priority to convene these kinds of conversations. It is imperative to continue investing in efforts that reduce the threat of nuclear weapons and arms races. “The symposium was a test of our hypothesis that there is a tremendous appetite for working at the nexus of critical issue spaces, and that doing so unlocks novel insights and opportunities for creating real change,” commented Gregory.
The event culminated in “A Night in the Future,” the closing reception where the Nuclear Futures Fellows announced a set of innovation projects they will pursue with our support. The fellows will draw from the workshop in order to execute projects that tackle the nuclear threat within the context of other existential risks. “The energy across the three days was palpable,” said Belcher. “We were blown away by the eagerness for these conversations, and look forward to harnessing the ideas that were generated and exploring future opportunities for collaboration.”
The Ploughshares Field Building team is now facilitating the next phase of the fellowship: launching the fellows’ capstone projects. The Field Building team is consulting and advising fellows individually, with a focus on maximizing [their] impact. We look forward to sharing more about their innovative projects as they carry out their projects in 2025 and the long-term, intergenerational impacts of investing in this generation’s ideas.