Tens of thousands of people are working to address the thicket of existential threats facing our societies and our planet in pursuit of a more just, sustainable, and secure world. But we’re so engrossed in the details, complexities, and interdependencies of tackling these threats—all the details of what must be accomplished and on what timeline—that problems and challenges fill our whole viewshed. The better place we’re trying to get to—a future beyond these threats—stands tiny, hazy, and uncontoured in the distance. We know what we’re trying to move our world away from, but what exactly are we moving it toward?
This is particularly true in the nuclear threat space. In our efforts to compel a world that no longer relies on nuclear weapons for global security, we have not yet collectively and fully imagined what that world might actually look like. By eradicating the nuclear threat, what will we have unleashed and enabled? What becomes possible when nuclear weapons have been removed from the human story? In a world in which a durable nuclear weapons prohibition has been achieved, what might be different, and what are the dividends?
It’s not just the people working on these threats who need to know. While overwhelming majorities of the public desire a world without nuclear weapons, most people don’t believe it is possible. The key reason, new research by the Nuclear Threat Initiative suggests, is the near complete absence of positive stories, in any medium, about a future that does not feature nuclear weapons. When NTI’s study participants were shown test media that included a positive vision of the future, something interesting happened—they were persuaded to shift their views on the urgency and achievability of nuclear disarmament.
We need a clearer depiction of how much brighter our future will be when nuclear weapons no longer hold the world hostage and global security has been deeply reimagined. We need a picture of what that world would look like so we can ask ourselves what steps we must take to create it. How do we describe, and bring alive, a future on the other side of nuclear weapons? And what if that future only becomes possible because we developed a vision of what it might look like—the big “so what” to all of our efforts?
Created by Horizon 2045 in collaboration with Arizona State University’s Center for Science and the Imagination, Far Futures invites science fiction authors, visual artists, musicians, and other creatives to explore a future in which we successfully manage our way through a combination of natural and anthropogenic threats—with a durable nuclear weapons prohibition as a cornerstone of that future. To launch the project, we invited a set of accomplished contributors to create technically grounded, inspiring visions of a future shaped by the decision to eliminate nuclear weapons and by the mechanics of achieving and maintaining a nuclear prohibition. We want to play out the assumption that by ridding ourselves of existential threat, we will have opened up new possibilities that create a better future.