To address the challenges of disarmament verification, though, you first have to know what they are—which, given the high levels of national security involved, is itself a challenge. “We can’t say, ‘Ah, this is what some weapon states are worried about,’ because we often don’t know,” says Alex Glaser, associate professor at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Princeton and director of the Nuclear Futures Lab. “Either we haven’t asked them what they worry about, there’s been no opportunity to tell us, or they have not yet thought through some of these issues.”

Until now, the best way to answer these questions has been through live exercises—elaborate in-person events, like the US and UK’s “Exercise Letterpress” and the UK-Norway Initiative, that simulate the inspection of a mock nuclear weapons complex or the dismantlement of a faux nuclear weapon. While these exercises always create new insights, says Patton, they’re both pricey and resource intensive. “Live exercises are valuable to our community, but they can take a lot of time to plan and execute, and they’re difficult to adapt, especially when you run into a part of any proposed verification system that doesn’t work and you might want to try something better.”

Hence the gaggle of diplomats gathered in the UN lobby. Virtual reality offers a new pathway for exploring the challenges of verification and experimenting with how they might be overcome. “We can do this in a virtual facility at a small fraction of the cost,” says Glaser. The Princeton team’s groundbreaking work to “develop full-motion VR to design and simulate new arms-control treaty verification approaches” is being funded through a grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, a founding member of the N Square funder collaborative.

For Patton, the project represents an exciting next step in her efforts to bring a new level of interactivity to the nonproliferation and disarmament space. As an undergrad at the University of Washington, she had taken a series of courses funded by the National Nuclear Security Administration to attract more talent to the nuclear field. Her first course was taught by Ambassador Thomas Graham, who helped negotiate the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty between the US and then USSR. “After that, I was hooked for life,” Patton says. But it wasn’t until serving as a research assistant at the US Naval Postgraduate School’s Common Operational Research Environment Laboratory and Remote Sensing Center, where she developed new techniques for creating 3D models of buildings and landscapes based on satellite imagery, that she found her calling—working at “the very tiny area of overlap between the worlds of arms control and digital art.”

At the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute and the Vienna Center for Disarmament and Non-Proliferation, she started applying her 3D modeling skills to nuclear problems. “I was interested in how we could adapt open source and other geospatial analysis tools for our challenges in this field,” says Patton, 29. At the Vienna Center, she started bringing the environments she was creating to life, designing an interactive verification experience in a dismantlement facility that could be run from a desktop computer. “Suddenly, we could look at verification questions from the inside out.”

In 2015, Patton started talking to Glaser about deepening her work. It was good timing. Virtual reality headsets were improving—“People were starting to be able to use them and not be nauseous,” says Patton—and using VR for verification was starting to become a real possibility. “I always thought this was an exciting approach,” Glaser explains. “When Tamara decided to come here, we started thinking about where we could take this.” They were still tossing around ideas when the MacArthur Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation of New York put out an RFP for “projects aimed at reducing nuclear risk through innovative and solutions-oriented approaches.”

In creating the VR simulation they ran in Geneva, the team tackled a host of design and developmental challenges—from constructing the virtual facilities and virtual verification technologies to working out simple things like how players would speak to one another or navigate between buildings. Ultimately, they presented three verification scenarios. In one, the diplomats, acting as inspectors, could randomly select a warhead from a nuclear submarine, watch it get loaded into a container, then use a radiation detector with an “information barrier” to acquire the warhead’s unique fingerprint. In another scenario, the diplomats found themselves staring at a 3D model of the thermonuclear weapon—dubbed the Peanut—recently tested by North Korea. “This was what most diplomats liked a lot—seeing a 3D model of a weapon that before was only seen in these pictures,” says Moritz Kütt, a postdoctoral research associate with the Princeton Nuclear Futures team who played “host” during the simulation.

THE DIPLOMATS FOUND THEMSELVES STARING AT A 3D MODEL OF THE THERMONUCLEAR WEAPON—DUBBED THE PEANUT—RECENTLY TESTED BY NORTH KOREA.

The Geneva event was a demo, not a serious exercise. Nevertheless, the team has already received useful feedback that it will use to tweak the VR environment. “This is one of the reasons that we saw VR as a really big opportunity,” says Patton. “We have this extra level of flexibility. When someone finds something they really like or don’t like, or we find a break in a chain of custody or discover evasion strategies in the process of working through an exercise, we can change it.” And starting with a notional facility designed to be as simple as possible can invite deeper engagement. “Participants might say, ‘If we add a door here, we can do X, Y, and Z, and it becomes much more realistic and plausible.’ In that way, they help co-design facilities that work best for everyone,” says Glaser. The more that experts engage with the VR environment, the better and more realistic it can become. And their ability to join simulations from a distance means that an even wider community of experts can get involved. “That’s one of its big plusses,” says Glaser. “It’s not an exclusive experience. Everyone can participate.”

There is a second part to the MacArthur grant, and it embraces this same principle—that in a world marked by rising nuclear risk, everyone needs a way to get involved. Through the grant, the Princeton team saw an opportunity to use VR as a means for engaging not just the nuclear expert community but the broader public as well. Working in partnership with Games for Change (G4C), a nonprofit that helps create and distribute social impact games, the team is helping to develop VR experiences designed to mobilize public awareness and more vocal political will around nuclear risk. “It’s about understanding what the medium is good at and why a VR experience is special and different from a game or a billboard,” says Susanna Pollack, president of Games for Change and a key N Square partner (the N Square team introduced Patton and Glaser to Pollack). “We need to create an experience that draws participants in rather than alienating them with imagery or something that’s overwhelming and depressing, where the proximity is immediate but not directly on top of you.”

On June 30, at the G4C Festival in New York City, Pollack will announce which development studio the team has chosen to partner with on the project. Meanwhile, with a growing network of connections made in Geneva and elsewhere, Patton and Glaser are working toward their first “virtual” live exercise this fall—a comprehensive inspection where participants develop agreements and protocols and then execute them in VR.

Of course, they would be the first to admit that VR is not an end in itself. “Ultimately you have to make progress in the real world,” Glaser says. But it is not a stretch to imagine how a growing comfort with approaching and addressing disarmament verification challenges through VR can help pave the way toward new treaties being negotiated. “We’re not there yet,” says Glaser. “But we’re really just starting now.”

story thumbnail photo: Michael Schoeppner

At PopTech, Heeley also networked with experts totally outside her field who pushed her thinking in new directions. “For the first time in my career, the ability to really brainstorm beyond the nuclear space was available to me,” recalls Heeley. These experiences sparked a big idea for Heeley: producing a “This American Life”-like podcast series focused on sharing “cool stories” about nuclear innovators and innovations with a broader public. The idea gained even more momentum after Heeley met Elizabeth Talerman, CEO of Nucleus and Innovators Network member, at the Disruptive Futures summit in Santa Fe in December 2016. Heeley attended the summit as part of a highly diverse cohort—comprising filmmakers, humanitarians, cyber experts, and others—again organized by N Square. Talerman’s research and presentation on the need to communicate nuclear issues in more accessible and connected ways hit home for Heeley. “It was everything that I already understood but couldn’t articulate,” she says.

“FOR THE FIRST TIME IN MY CAREER, THE ABILITY TO REALLY BRAINSTORM BEYOND THE NUCLEAR SPACE WAS AVAILABLE TO ME.” 

Soon, Heeley started thinking about her work very differently—and feeling new urgency to share nuclear innovation stories with non-nuclear audiences in ways that inspired stronger public interest. “There are a lot of smart people working on this but we don’t know how to talk to anyone but ourselves,” admits Heeley. She credits the Innovators Network for helping her identify ways to communicate her work differently, and with different audiences in mind. “What this community needs is someone to tell us, ‘You’re all talking to each other in your secret language, and that’s why you’re not moving the ball on these issues.’”

After Heeley proposed her podcast idea, N Square connected her with Public Radio International (PRI), an N Square partner whose new corporate strategy focuses on cultivating the network effect. PRI CEO Alissa Miller, who learned about N Square by attending a TED luncheon in 2016, had signaled an interest in closer collaboration, saying she sees PRI’s job as “building bridges in a fractured society.” With that in mind, N Square facilitated a meeting with Kathy Merritt, then PRI’s VP for content strategy and development. Merritt, a 30-year veteran in radio, is responsible for identifying and acquiring diverse new talent and supporting PRI’s productions to increase audience and impact.

Merritt loved Heeley’s proposal and—with N Square, Ploughshares Fund, and others on board as funders—agreed to pilot “Things That Go Boom” and test its potential to inspire millions to feel more connected to nuclear issues. The series debuted at the beginning of 2018 and proved an almost instant success. Within weeks, the podcast had been downloaded more than 230,000 times and made iTunes’s “New and Noteworthy” list. Pilot episodes covered stories about nuclear false alarms, deterrence theory as interpreted by an 11-year-old boy, how Nancy Sinatra’s hit “These Boots Were Made for Walking” became a military anthem, and—in acknowledgment of another Innovators Network member—how Tom Weis, professor at Rhode Island School of Design, is training industrial design students to use their skills to reduce nuclear threats.

The show has hit a chord with listeners. “A nice kickoff to understanding the logic of stumbling into a nuclear war nobody wants,” said one listener about the first episode. And it manages to do just what Heeley had long envisioned. “‘Things That Go Boom’ explores national security and foreign policy in a way that doesn’t make you want to gouge out your eyes,” reads a memo released jointly by PRI and Heeley. “You don’t have to be an expert to tune in. Just grab a cup of whatever you like and pull up a seat.”

“The reality is that the NUKEMAP’s creation is one of these uninteresting stories where you remember a piece of old code on a Thursday for no reason and rewrite it over the weekend and it takes off a week later in a way you never would have expected,” summarizes Wellerstein. “It’s an utterly unlikely outcome.”

In some ways, Wellerstein’s whole career has been unlikely. Growing up in Stockton, California, in the late 80s and early 90s, he had no particular job trajectory in mind. “I knew I wanted to do interesting things, but what does that mean?” says Wellerstein. Then he went to Berkeley, and two things happened. First, he took an American history course that proved transformative. His high schooler’s view of history as a list of dates and political moments to memorize was replaced with a feeling that the stories we tell about the past deeply shape our understanding of the present and the possible future.

Second, he started nosing around Berkeley’s archives. Drawn to the study of the history of science and technology, Wellerstein began working closely with historian of physics Cathryn Carson on the early history of the nuclear age. Then he stumbled on something surprising: evidence of deep connections between the left-leaning university and the development of nuclear weapons. “Berkeley was still at that time the primary contractor for the Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore National Labs,” says Wellerstein. “It was all sort of hidden in plain sight.” He went on to write two undergraduate theses: one on history of compulsory sterilization in California, and a second on the University of California and the management of nuclear weapons. He became hooked on the work of historical research, taking the detective work of the archive and piecing it into a new story about the past.

“I never in a million years would have guessed that this is what I would do with my life,” reflects Wellerstein, who went from Berkeley to Harvard for a PhD. “It’s improbable that anyone would be a historian of science, frankly. There are not that many jobs. Nobody even knows what it is.” Also improbable: that Wellerstein would become one of a dozen or so historians of science in the world who focus primarily on nuclear weapons, and, within that, the only one focused on nuclear secrecy—an area he says is less understood than most aspects of the bomb. “It’s this whole history that most people weren’t really thinking about after the Cold War ended, and yet was incredibly interesting and incredibly rich and still relevant,” says Wellerstein, who compulsively collects declassified FBI files on weapons designers, and has a computer dedicated to scraping the CIA’s websites for declassified PDFs and turning them into a searchable database. “You can just keep digging and there is always more to find. I still haven’t gotten close to exhausting it.”

“IT’S IMPROBABLE THAT ANYONE WOULD BE A HISTORIAN OF SCIENCE. THERE ARE NOT THAT MANY JOBS. NOBODY EVEN KNOWS WHAT IT IS.”

More improbability followed. There was NUKEMAP and the UK tabloid, of course. Then there was Restricted Data: The Nuclear Secrecy Blog, which he also launched as a postdoc. In academia, writing for popular audiences is a highly uncommon practice capable of obliterating your tenure and job chances. Against all advice, Wellerstein blogged anyway. “I wanted an academic job, but I was more interested in being somebody whose expertise in the field is seen as useful for a broader conversation,” explains Wellerstein, who also sells nuclear-themed t-shirts and mugs through the blog. “I started it as a way to raise a flag and say, ‘Hey everybody, I work on this topic and I’ve found all sorts of neat things. Here is my stuff.’ I had the idea that if I got really good at that, there might be an institution willing to support this work.”

There was. Restricted Data drew attention—and lecture invitations. One came from Stevens Institute of Technology, an institution that tends to welcome scholars who do nontraditional work and, against all odds, also had a job opening. (About 10 tenure-track jobs in the history of science come available in the US each year, often with more than 100 applicants for each job.) Wellerstein, who hadn’t applied anywhere else, got the position. Then, as he describes it, “the Matthew effect of accumulated advantage kicked in, and everything snowballed.” One interesting opportunity led to another, from working as a historical advisor to the nuclear-themed television show Manhattan to being invited to write for The New Yorker’s science blog. “I get to spend all of my time doing things that I find interesting at my own direction while being able to pay the rent,” he says. “The whole thing feels kind of ridiculous sometimes.”

Now, Wellerstein has set out to create on purpose what he created years ago with NUKEMAP by accident—modern tools for communicating nuclear risk that gain wide cultural resonance. For years, Wellerstein has nurtured an interest in Cold War-era Civil Defense, the almost hokey public programs rolled out in the 1950s and 1960s to help prepare everyday Americans for nuclear attack. In academia, Wellerstein says, Civil Defense is mostly just mocked. “Films like Duck and Cover are easy to make fun of, and some of the pamphlets about how to be in your fallout shelter make it look like this is just something you do on a Sunday afternoon, reading a magazine while nuclear war is happening outside.”

But the more he studied Civil Defense, the less smug he felt. “’Duck and cover’ is pretty sound advice for the threat situation of 1952, if you’re imagining not very many bombs, only of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki range, and you’re living a bit out from ground zero,” he says. After talking to people who had crouched under plenty of desks during that era, he started to think that Civil Defense had a strong upside. “Essentially everyone I’ve met who did those drills says that they made the threat feel real—and that’s exactly the feeling that is missing today,” says Wellerstein. “One of our problems with nuclear policy in this country is that most people feel totally disconnected from it, and that makes it very hard to make it a political issue or to get support for a law or for reform. If you had more people feeling like their futures and lives and livelihoods were directly invested in those questions, you could potentially translate that into political action.”

In 2017, the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation—two of N Square’s founding funders—put out an RFP for “projects aimed at reducing nuclear risk through innovative and solutions-oriented approaches.” Wellerstein submitted a proposal for what he dubbed Reinventing Civil Defense, a two-year multidisciplinary effort to explore how to bring the threats posed by nuclear weapons back into popular consciousness through a reimagined public education strategy. Wellerstein—along with two of his colleagues at Stevens, Kristyn Karl, a political psychologist who does experiments in risk perception, and Julie Pullen, an oceanographer who has predicted how weapons fallout might disburse in coastal cities—won one of 11 grants awarded. The project also has a set of outside advisors, several of whom, like Wellerstein, are members of the N Square Innovators Network.

Wellerstein doesn’t see the prospect of rekindling Civil Defense as remotely farfetched, especially given the sharp rise of public and government interest in nuclear disaster response in the wake of North Korea’s missile testing. If anything, he thinks that ditching the Cold War-era Civil Defense is what led to the present-day predicament of nuclear threat feeling more remote than real. But one thing is certain: the new iteration he’s aiming for will not look quite like the old one. Rather than pamphlets and films, Wellerstein and his colleagues are exploring the development of virtual reality games, apps, graphic novels, and other digital products and tools geared toward a modern audience. “The big question,” says Wellerstein, “is what would nonpartisan, non-delusional Civil Defense look like for the 21st century?”

NUKEMAP may offer some clues. Ample research suggests that the kind of active learning that NUKEMAP offers—where learners interact with information and come to their own insights—creates deeper engagement and understanding. Approaches to Civil Defense that enable individuals to “discover” something on their own might work similarly well. Some educators have started using NUKEMAP to tell a story about what happens when a bomb goes off, creating a kind of emotional resonance that a circle on a map might not otherwise—and drawing focus to the magnitude of the lived effects of nuclear bombs. And a NUKEMAP-based presentation Wellerstein likes to give to help students grasp the difference in scale between the Hiroshima bomb and the first hydrogen bomb has similar impact. “Everyone gasps,” says Wellerstein. “If you can get a 19-year-old to audibly gasp at something in a lecture, then you’ve done something powerful.”

“THE BIG QUESTION IS WHAT WOULD NONPARTISAN, NON-DELUSIONAL CIVIL DEFENSE LOOK LIKE FOR THE 21ST CENTURY?”

Turning what to many seems like a remote and theoretical threat—that a nuclear weapon would be deployed in our lifetime—into a felt reality worth preparing for won’t be easy, of course. But history offers hope. “The history of public health is full of examples of how a bunch of academic-type people hacked the culture on a major scale,” Wellerstein says. That older people sneeze into their hands while younger ones sneeze into their elbow, he explains, is entirely learned behavior. “Public health essentially rebuilt the infrastructure and the way in which people thought. It did this by teaching children in particular new, embodied practices—like how to sneeze and how to drink water—that made them act as if they live in a world in which there are germs and viruses, even if they can’t be seen. This was the translation of theoretical knowledge into really practical knowledge. I take a lot of inspiration from that sort of thing.”

That nuclear threats have become near-daily headline news these days makes Reinventing Civil Defense particularly timely. “I try not to get worried about things, but I feel like the chances of something really awful occurring are higher than most people are willing to admit—certainly higher than they have been in my conscious lifetime.” It’s not total annihilation that worries him, though. “It’s the United States putting aside this legacy of norms that have built up—never easily, never uncontestably—over decades, things like non-nuclear use, a stockpile that goes down but doesn’t go up, the cessation of nuclear testing,” Wellerstein explains. “If those things change, then it becomes very hard to know what the future might be, and most of the possibilities are not positive.”

Wellerstein says that many people are skeptical when they hear about his hopes for Reinventing Civil Defense. But once he explains the concept, they think it sounds interesting, maybe even promising. That’s good, he says. “But it’s also a little disturbing to me that, for many people, it’s starting to seem like a great idea. That’s maybe as much of a sign of where we are as a world as anything else. ”