Exactly 39 years ago this week, a Soviet military officer stopped an all-out nuclear war. On the night of September 26, 1983, Lt. Col. Stanislav Petrov was monitoring early-warning systems when alarms went off: The United States had just launched five nuclear missiles toward Russia. Or had it?
Under immense pressure to retaliate, Petrov instead followed a gut feeling and told his superiors that the incoming attack was a false alarm. That gut feeling prevented a nuclear exchange that would have killed up to 288 million people outright — by far the deadliest violent event in human history.
Sadly, nuclear weapons aren’t just a thing of the past. More than 13,000 nuclear warheads still exist , and the war in Ukraine has demonstrated how easily nuclear tensions can escalate. Just last week, Russian President Vladimir Putin made veiled nuclear threats as he mobilized additional troops in his faltering battle against Ukraine.
And nuclear weapons aren’t connected only to wars. People are dying today of radiation-related illnesses — the result of a shameful legacy of testing nukes in populated areas.
Nuclear weapons rank alongside climate change and pandemics as existential threats to life as we know it. And yet, nuclear-risk reduction is one of the most underfunded areas of philanthropy. Less than 1 percent of last year’s peace and security funding went toward nuclear issues, according to data from the Peace and Security Funding Map. Nearly 60 percent of these philanthropic funds came from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, which next year plans to stop investing in nuclear-related programs — dealing a huge blow to nonprofits that had long depended on its support.
All donors have a unique opportunity today to shape this important and underserved field. Groups focused on preventing nuclear proliferation are woefully underfunded because the field is wrongly perceived as too bureaucratic, and its work as too technical and difficult to measure. How, after all, does one measure a negative, such as preventing a nuclear terrorist attack or averting a nuclear war? Anything that is hard to measure is also hard to fund — unless risk-tolerant donors with long time horizons are willing to step in.
In reality, nuclear issues aren’t rocket science. A Ph.D. isn’t necessary to understand and offer solutions on how to tackle the nuclear problem. And myriad philanthropy-supported policy wins that change is possible and does not occur only behind closed bureaucratic doors.
Heightened public concerns about nuclear issues should also draw more grant makers to this work. A recent poll by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found that most Americans are very concerned that Russia will use nuclear weapons in Ukraine, and 75 percent are “at least somewhat concerned that Russia will target the United States with nuclear weapons.”
There are three targeted ways donors can contribute to preventing a catastrophic nuclear war.
Build political power. One of the biggest obstacles to philanthropic engagement in nuclear issues is the heavy focus on policy change. Funding direct advocacy or lobbying is one way to achieve such change, but it is far from the only way. Several nonprofits are involved in grassroots mass-mobilization efforts to build political power around the reduction or elimination of nuclear weapons, but these are often barebones operations that need more donor dollars.
They include groups such as Beyond the Bomb, which relies primarily on volunteers to increase support at the local, state, and national levels to prevent nuclear war. The organization is currently championing legislation that would put restraints on the singular power of the president to start a nuclear conflict. More high-profile groups, such as the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, which won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2017, need the financial support and visibility that comes from dependable philanthropic backing.
The convening ability of philanthropy can also be especially valuable. Some of the most important nuclear negotiations of recent decades had foundation support. For example, grant makers, such as Ploughshares Fund, played no small part in the successful ratification of the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty in 2010 by convening the nuclear community around a joint communications strategy, grassroots campaign, policy-maker education, and direct lobbying. The treaty reduced American and Russian deployed strategic nuclear warheads by roughly 30 percent.
During President Obama’s Nuclear Security Summit in 2010, the Stanley Center for Peace and Security was a collaborator and paid all expenses for roundtrip airfares, hotel rooms, and an expensive downtown Washington, D.C., venue so that more than 100 nuclear-security experts from around the world could meet with policy makers on strategies for locking down nuclear-bomb-making materials that can fall into the hands of terrorists. Stanley’s continuing support has allowed civil society to play an important role on this and other nuclear issues — and to hold policy makers accountable to their pledges.
Because peace and security issues are so fluid and fast paced, rapid-response grants are often needed to address crises or respond to unforeseen opportunities for progress. During negotiations for the Iran nuclear deal in 2015, for example, donors paid for experts to conduct unofficial, or Track-II, diplomacy. This included back-channel talks over dinners in Geneva, which were financed by private foundations and helped bring those at the table closer to a deal.
Fund research. New data and analysis give policy makers the tools they need to respond to nuclear threats. For example, a recent study by Metaculus, which aggregates expert information to predict events, found that the risk of nuclear conflict in the wake of the war in Ukraine is similar to the risk during the Cold War.
Research also played a critical role in the Iran nuclear deal. Specifically, a grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York to the Princeton University Program on Science and Global Security supported research involving a central obstacle to a successful agreement: Iran’s Arak heavy-water nuclear reactor, which could be used to produce plutonium. The Princeton team suggested a redesign of the reactor core that would make it impossible to produce weapons-grade nuclear material, resulting in a proposal by Iran to significantly lower plutonium production and resolve a key technical hurdle to a deal.
Engage new leaders. The nuclear field has long been the province of mostly white men. Several efforts seek to change this dynamic and would benefit from increased funding. Nonprofit groups such as Bombshelltoe and N Square, for example, are using art and other innovations to make the nuclear discussion more accessible to the broader public and to tap into new perspectives.
The Ploughshares Fund recently announced $1 million in new grants to “build a stronger community of advocates ... working together across identity, sector, and geography to reduce and eventually eliminate nuclear weapons.” The grants are part of Ploughshare’s Equity Rises initiative, which aims to develop a more diverse pipeline of leaders in the nuclear field.
Stanford professor emeritus Martin Hellman stated in 2009 that the “risk of a child born today suffering an early death due to nuclear war is at least 10 percent.” Each provocation between nuclear-armed states, whether intentional or inadvertent, poses a small risk of starting nuclear war, but the cumulative probability over a century of these incidents makes “nuclear war virtually inevitable.”
These grim odds warrant everyone’s attention but should particularly interest donors who care about peace, security, and the viability of future life on Earth. Today’s younger generations should not have to grow up wondering whether they will have the luxury of a future. While nuclear weapons are only one of the existential threats facing us today, they are alarmingly underrepresented in the philanthropic conversation. That urgently needs to change.
