25 January 2023. Nuclear | Futures
The Doomsday Clock moves closer to midnight.// Giant Leap, or Too Little Too Late
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1: The Doomsday Clock moves closer to midnight
One of the things about doing this regularly is that there are some annual events that you need to look for, and one of those things is the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists annual updating of the ‘Doomsday Clock’. It’s not just about how close we are to midnight, but also about their critical assessment of geopolitics and other global issues.
That happened yesterday, and the clock moved ten seconds closer to midnight. It’s now at ninety seconds, which is the closest it has ever been to global catastrophe.
The Bulletin says that this is mostly, but not exclusively down to the mounting dangers of the war in Ukraine. Russia doesn’t get a good press in the Bulletin’s statement.
Russia’s war on Ukraine has raised profound questions about how states interact, eroding norms of international conduct that underpin successful responses to a variety of global risks. And worst of all, Russia’s thinly veiled threats to use nuclear weapons remind the world that escalation of the conflict—by accident, intention, or miscalculation—is a terrible risk.
The war also contravenes several decades of assurances by Russia, going back to 1994 when Russia declared—with the USA and the UK—that it would "respect the independence and sovereignty and the existing borders of Ukraine" and "refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of Ukraine..." In exchange, Ukraine agreed to relinquish the nuclear weapons on its territory and sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
The Bulletin also calls out the way that Russia has put nuclear stations at risk during the war:
Russia has also brought its war to the Chernobyl and Zaporizhzhia nuclear reactor sites, violating international protocols and risking widespread release of radioactive materials. Efforts by the International Atomic Energy Agency to secure these plants so far have been rebuffed.
Part of the collateral damage of the war is the negotiations on the New START treaty, the last remaining nuclear weapons treaty between Russia and the US:
Unless the two parties resume negotiations and find a basis for further reductions, the treaty will expire in February 2026. This would eliminate mutual inspections, deepen mistrust, spur a nuclear arms race, and heighten the possibility of a nuclear exchange.
Well, there’s quite a lot more in that vein. The Bulletin also notes that biological weapons and chemical weapons have been drawn into a war of misinformation, again largely promoted by Russia. The article is illustrated by a photograph from a Security Council meeting where Russia’s ambassador to the United Nations, Vassily Nebenzia, accuses the United States and Ukraine of concealing a bioweapons program.
(Security Council, 11 March, 2022. UN Photo/Evan Schneider)
In summary, the Bulletin concludes:
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has increased the risk of nuclear weapons use, raised the specter of biological and chemical weapons use, hamstrung the world’s response to climate change, and hampered international efforts to deal with other global concerns.
The version on the website is a summary—there’s a much longer articleas well. That touches on nuclear-related events elsewhere, none of them good, across China, North Korea, Iran, India, and Pakistan. On North Korea and Iran, there has been little in the way of progress on negotiations of any kind. India, meanwhile,
“continues to modernize its nuclear arsenal of some 160 warheads, with new delivery systems now under development to complement or replace existing nuclear- capable aircraft, land-based delivery systems, and sea-based systems. Pakistan has an arsenal of similar size and continues to expand its warheads, delivery systems, and fissile material production.”
On China:
China’s considerable expansion of its nuclear capabilities is particularly troubling, given its consistent refusal to consider measures to enhance transparency and predictability. The US Defense Department claims Beijing may increase its arsenal fivefold by 2035 and could soon rival the nuclear capabilities of the United States and Russia, with unpredictable consequences for stability.
The Bulletin’s longer statement reminds us that we do have mechanisms that are designed to reduce the risk of further nuclear proliferation and of nuclear risk:
As a matter of priority, all five permanent members of the UN Security Council— including, especially, Russia—should make a renewed commitment to confront nuclear dangers through arms control efforts and strategic stability agreements. At the proper time, major multilateral nuclear diplomacy will be needed precisely because of a dire reality the Ukraine crisis underscores: The existential threat posed by nuclear weapons endures even as political circumstances change.
They point out that there’s also a need to keep information channels open, since—as we know historically—miscalculation or mistake is at least as big a risk as the intentional use of nuclear weapons:
at a minimum, the United States must keep the door open to principled engagement with Moscow that reduces the dangerous increase in nuclear risk the war has fostered. One element of risk reduction could involve sustained, high-level US military-to-military contacts with Russia to reduce the likelihood of miscalculation.
The best, or perhaps the only song, about the Doomsday Clock is by Pete Wylie and Wah!. It was recorded right at the start of the 1980s, which still felt like an anxious time. But the clock was set at a frankly luxurious seven minutes to midnight.
2: Giant Leap, or Too Little Too Late
I am speaking this afternoon at an event to mark a decade of the journal Futures. I was asked for a five minute provocation looking backwards and forwards at futures work. This is more or less what I will be saying.
I started as a futurist in 2000, and looking back to when I started, a lot of the things I learned then were wrong. As I continue to do this work, I have become more heretical.
Before I get to the heresies, the best thing that has happened since 2000 has been the gradual eclipse of the 2x2 intuitive logics scenarios framework by the whole excitingly diverse range of critical futures approaches.
I’ve done more 2x2 scenarios than I can remember, but they are profoundly limiting, and one of the reasons for this is that scenarios are often profoundly unhelpful for organisations who are trying to make change.
There are several reasons for this. They are cognitively difficult to work with—almost impossible, in fact. They don’t align well with how organisations make decisions. And no matter how clear your processes are for getting from scenarios to implications to actions, something in there is always going to look like a black box.
(Escaping from the black box. Photo: ‘black box’, by Petra Gagilas/flickr. CC BY-SA 2.0)
For me, this point about cognition is critical. We only ever work with a subset of the people in the organisation we’re engaging with. When the project is over, those people need to be able to explain what they did to others in the organisation, and those others need to understand it. This is a social learning question.
So in my current practice I tend to recommend a futures landscape approach, which creates a map of domains, or sub-systems, that describe the emerging futures landscape, in all of its contradictions. This seems to make the futures work stickier. People get it much faster. They can tell the story themselves, which is where effective futures work starts.
I’ve also become increasingly sceptical of the idea that futures work is somehow designed to manage uncertainty. I think now that it’s better suited to reducing uncertainty and identifying how best to act to achieve vision and purpose.
Let me unpack that a bit.
We’re taught on Day One as futurists that “there are no future facts”. It’s hard-coded into the literature. It’s Futures 101. But it isn’t at all clear why.
The idea comes from a fantastically narrow version of Hume’s idea of induction, one that’s questioned in the philosophy literature. A moment’s reflection tells you that it is nonsense. If there are no future facts, then the future is absolutely and radically open all of the time. This is obviously not the case.
At the very least—and a nod to Richard Sandford of UCL for this—there are present facts that extend into the future and lock in certain elements of that future. As my colleagues at the Institute of Social Futures at Lancaster University say, futures have a context, a history, and a geography.
Anyway, in suggesting that futures work is about reducing the realm of the uncertain, I’m partly following in the steps of Pierre Wack, who used to make a distinction between diagnostic scenarios, that mapped out a landscape, and decision scenarios, that identified options.
Decision scenarios used a combination of structural analysis and actor analysis to rule out certain outcomes that were apparently possible but in practice were very unlikely. I did a similar exercise recently, although without the large staff and three year working cycle that Pierre Wack enjoyed at Shell.
(Alternative futures. James Dator, image adapted by Andrew Curry from Futures Research Group)
My exercise was designed to use the four Hawai’i alternative futures to think about planetary futures. You’ll remember these: Growth, Collapse, Discipline, and Transformation, though not necessarily in that order. When you look at these through the frame of ethical or desirable futures, only one of them represents a future that is likely to be sustainable, in all the senses of that word, and then only in certain circumstances.
And since I’ve mentioned the e-word, there is still not enough about ethics in the futures field. The lasting legacy of Global Business Network’s 2x2 scenarios is a large hole where our ethics ought to be— famously described by Richard Slaughter as “flatland”. Future Matters, co-written by Chris Groves, tries to repair this hole, but it seems to be much more read outside of the futures field than inside it.
So, going back to my alternative futures, the only one that provides a route to sustainability is Transformation, and then only if it is not dependent on a technology transformation.
We see the same lesson in the Club of Rome’s recent pair of Earth4All scenarios. These are helpfully called Too Little Too Late, and Giant Leap. Too Little Too Late oscillates between Discipline and Collapse. Giant Leap involves an ambitious and layered just transition.
We’ve all been taught that the risks of having a pair of scenarios is that people choose the one they prefer, but that’s exactly the point. Great Leap is a vision and a plan, Too Little Too Late is an awful warning.
So for me, now, futures is about making visions work.
Obviously vision building became completely marginalised in the futures literature, but it’s visions that we need now, to help us find the fast shrinking path to a liveable future.
(Patrick Geddes, via Wikipedia. Public Domain)
As I conclude here, I’m reminded of the Scottish scientist and urbanist Patrick Geddes and his idea of heart, head, and hands. Each was informed by the other—but he started with the heart, with caring. The heart is where change comes from.
Looking back over two decades or so, all those scenarios I did in the early 2000s were pretty much all about the head.
Looking forwards, we’re going to need a lot more heart, and a lot more hands, if the work that we do as futurists is going to have any purpose or any effect.
As the systems theorist Donella Meadows once said:
“The future can’t be predicted, but it can be envisioned and brought lovingly into being.”
j2t#419
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