By Emma Sandifer
This month, the world is looking into the past to commemorate the 80th anniversaries of the U.S. bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. At the same time, it is mired in the present, evaluating the threats posed by nuclear threat exchanges between the United States and Russia. It is easy to work in this space and evaluate nuclear weapons policy by looking exclusively into the past or present. Recently, however, I was given the tools to finally start looking into the future.
In the spring of this year, I was named one of Ploughshares Foundation and Horizon 2045’s Nuclear Futures Fellows. During the one-week intensive in July, Horizon 2045, an organization focused on futures thinking in the nuclear threat reduction field, introduced the fellows to the building blocks of systems and futures thinking. Together, we envisioned future scenarios that may occur based on current events on the world stage, we crafted strategies to respond to possible future scenarios, and we identified signals that might indicate that a future scenario is imminent. This type of thinking allows policy practitioners to have plans of action in place for whatever scenario may occur, allowing for more informed and proactive policymaking. We asked ourselves, based on what we know now, what could happen in the future and how can we act in the short, medium, and long term to promote a more safe and secure world?
This type of forward thinking is not easy to do but is more vital than ever as the threat environment becomes increasingly complex and swift. I now understand that thinking through logical policy responses to theoretical future crises is a necessary aspect of nuclear threat reduction work which is often, understandably, overlooked in favor of current crises. That is why fellowships like this are so important — to force us to take a moment to look beyond the threat landscape as it appears right now and develop a more nuanced understanding of how the world works together as an interconnected system.
The fellowship cohort is an international mix of nuclear weapons policy practitioners scattered throughout both the world and the nuclear weapons policy field, ranging from artists to analysts and everything in between. The approaches and perspectives shared at the intensive inspire hope for the future of the nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament field.
In the coming months, I will be working with Ploughshares and Horizon2045 to develop a project that seeks to navigate the current and future problems that we deal with every day at the Center. Stay tuned for more!
