Raising Awareness and Building Community is Key to Reducing Nuclear Threat

Ploughshares had the opportunity to sit down with Alex Bell, the new president and CEO of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, to discuss what’s changed in the nuclear field, pressing issues, and how best to communicate to a broader audience about the nuclear threat and inspire them to act.

As part of Ploughshares’ role as a field builder, we believe it is important to recognize and lift up those in the nuclear field who are helping to share our stories, particularly those who may be providing or amplifying a viewpoint that has historically been absent from the conversation.

The Bulletin is celebrating its 80th anniversary this year. Obviously, you haven’t been around for the full 80 years, but you have spent your career in the nuclear policy field. What’s different today? How have things changed over time?

“We’ve gotten to the hard part. The nuclear problem is exponentially more complex now.”

The dawn of the nuclear age was a time of discovery, but there was also a clear indication that this was a massive change in the security environment, which triggered an increase in scholarship and policy debates. We veered very close to catastrophe with the Cuban Missile Crisis. After that, we started to create structures, controls, and restraints to reduce the threat of nuclear war. People associate nuclear threat with the Cold War, but we still have an incredibly dangerous number of nuclear weapons in the world today.

Every step at this point becomes more difficult. When the overall number of nuclear weapons is lower, the verification process has to be more complex, more intrusive. We have to find ways to trust people and countries who we may not like. Creating these structures and maintaining them costs money.

We have interlocking issues – climate change affects nuclear risks and biosecurity, and emerging and disruptive technologies affect everything. Because of this, we need to bring even more people into conversation. We have an incredibly diverse and motivated group of people working on nuclear risk, but the more we can draw from the expertise of other communities and thought processes, the better likelihood we have of solving problems.

What do you consider the most pressing nuclear issue of the next 1-5 years?

It’s hard to pick just one, because fixing one problem in the space doesn’t fix the entire problem. I could say – getting bilateral talks with Russia back on track, but that doesn’t solve the problem of China’s growing arsenal. I could say fixing things we have started, like treaty negotiations for a ban on weapons grade fissile material.

“Fundamentally, we have to decide what we’re doing – all this time having seen the edge of the abyss, accidents, close calls to nuclear conflicts — and now we’ve been in stasis for 30 years. What are we doing? Are we committed to the nuclear nonproliferation treaty? To seeing it through? To putting the work in?”

We have to do a better job communicating that if we don’t get this right, nothing else matters. Concerns about climate change, equity, affordability of healthcare and education – none of it matters if we don’t figure out a way to save ourselves from ourselves. The nuclear threat does not decrease in the face of political leanings or sovereignty.

“People are not powerless. There are things that can be done on an individual level to reduce the nuclear threat.”

We need more people to recognize that the threat is real and more pressing than they realize. We need them to lean about it – reading the Bulletin is a great place to start. Get familiarized with the structures and controls that are in place. Know what is at stake and demand action from leaders at all levels. Our political leaders haven’t had to answer questions about this.

The Bulletin has a broad audience with which it tries to communicate. How do you best communicate about risk and the importance of policy change with the general public? With the Doomsday Clock, for example, how do you channel that knowledge into action versus despair?

It’s difficult work that takes patience and persistence. The Doomsday Clock was the cover of the Bulletin’s first magazine – but the image was so compelling that it has stayed all these years. It’s a simple but evocative encapsulation of the state of existential risk.

“Every year, it serves as a starting point for the conversation. A way to talk to millions of people around the world about what the risks are, and then what we can do. What steps can we take?”

In general, the Bulletin thinks about how to present scientifically sound responses to these existing threats using a variety of types of messaging, techniques, and communication formats to reach a broader audience. Our goal is to create a space where people can come and find answers. Where they can learn, not only about issues, but also how they can take action. And we want to do that in an accessible way.

Ploughshares has recently focused on its commitment to expanding the nuclear field and centering diverse voices. Has the Bulletin made similar efforts? How are you prioritizing who gets to be the ‘voice?’

“We are not going to solve problems like reducing nuclear risk if we leave huge portions of the population out of the conversation.”

The scope and complex nature of nuclear risk means that we will need creative solutions and diversity of thought. With the Bulletin specifically, we believe that diversifying the voices we hear from improves the quality and richness of the coverage.

We have a Voices of Tomorrow program, where we encourage emerging experts to submit their pieces to the Bulletin and have a dedicated editor that works closely with them to help them improve their arguments and analysis – to help shape their article. We know the opportunity to be published in the Bulletin can be a launching pad for both future opportunities and career advancement.

More formally, we have a mentorship program – the Editorial Fellows. This program pairs a rising expert and an editor to partner on a series of articles throughout the year.

I’m also the third woman in a row to lead the Bulletin, and I don’t discount the effect of that. Of seeing women in leadership roles within the nuclear field. Our Board Fellows program, done in conjunction with Women of Color Advancing Peace, Security, and Conflict Transformation (WCAPS) invites rising leaders within the field into our Board meetings so they can see the work that occurs at that level.

Maybe one of the reasons we still struggle to reduce nuclear risks is that there have never been enough people at the table. We have to build new cohorts of diverse and talented experts. We have to find missing perspectives.

In a recent interview, you said that the deterrence and disarmament communities should be talking more – can you expand on that? How can we best bring these communities together?

Very carefully! It’s not easy to ask people who are used to looking at a problem from one perspective to open up their thought processes.

“The overwhelming majority of people in both camps are interested in the same thing. Preventing the use of nuclear weapons. But they have clear policy differences in how they think we should go about doing that.”

We need to create more opportunities for people with varying views to interact. In many ways, those opportunities have gone away. It’s more comfortable to be with people who share our beliefs.

But how do we protect our fellow citizens, the international community, our planet? We see the Bulletin as part of the process. We host events. We create features that ask people to engage in civil debate. We need to find the solutions to these problems that have been impeding our efforts to reduce nuclear threats.

As a former team member at Ploughshares, how do you see the two organizations (Ploughshares and the Bulletin) best working together to achieve our common mission?

We already work together well. We both focus on science-driven pragmatic solutions to problems. We aren’t peer reviewed journals that are designed to speak only to an expert crowd. Together, we can serve as a bridge to the general public and bring more people into the circle to collaborate.

Both organizations have long and venerable histories of working toward achieving our goals of eliminating threats and increasing awareness for the purpose of driving action. We’re both proof that you don’t have to be a huge organization to have a big impact.

I was at Ploughshares when they were first setting up the Washington, DC office and it took a while to pick out the furniture. For a while, I sat on a kitchen stool with my computer on a counter and my feet in a cabinet. I’d been in the Peace Corps, so it was a better office setup than many I’d had.

“We are both organizations that can fight above our weight class because we have committed people who are willing to do ‘office camping’ to get things going.”

What else should people know about the nuclear threat?

There are so many threats out there. It can be difficult to process, to think through which threat is worse. But the main thing to understand is that these threats are interconnected.

“I personally believe that the nuclear risk is the most dangerous, considering the speed and scope of devastation that would occur, but that is not to say we can take our eyes off the others.”

We have to engage and collaborate more with other communities, because all of these risks impact each other. We have to have a broader perspective.

Ploughshares has said that they want to get the nuclear threat back into the ‘Top 10’ issues that people are concerned about. How do we go about communicating the risk?

“We need to make the connections clearer between things that people do have on their mind and the nuclear threat.”

For instance, civil nuclear technology could help with climate change. But we have to be aware of 1) how do we safely dispose of nuclear waste and 2) the potential that it could be used as a nuclear weapon starter kit.

The effects of climate change – what happens if the permafrost melts and releases pathogens that have been eradicated and those re-enter the population? Are there conflicts because of pandemics? Those conflicts may well increase the nuclear risk.

Artificial intelligence -its arrival is a change in the security environment that can be used both for good and bad. As people are thinking through all of these issues they care about, we also need them to realize that they are interconnected with the nuclear threat.

“The trick is to get people talking about the issue before a crisis happens.”

We need to increase exposure. The more people that know about a nuclear threat, the more real it feels. The Bulletin tries to do this. We publish the Federation of American Scientists’ Nuclear Notebooks, which is an estimation of how many nuclear weapons there are in the world.

Pop culture can be a great way to spread the message. The Oppenheimer movie was very popular and helped raise awareness, but there was a long time before that where Hollywood hadn’t covered the nuclear threat at all – excluding alien invasion movies.

“This year is the 80th anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. People don’t realize that those were small nuclear explosions by today’s standards, and they destroyed cities. Today’s weapons are exponentially larger and more dangerous.”

We need to figure out how to connect with people without having to rely on the situation getting much, much worse. We don’t need them to start building fallout shelters or hide under tables – which never would have done anything anyway. We need them to be aware and to tell their political leaders that they care about this issue. Politicians are not going to take action if they aren’t hearing from their constituents that they are invested in reducing nuclear risk.