BASIC’s latest publication in conjunction with its Emerging Voices Network offers a compelling insight by early career experts as to how it’s possible to achieve a world without nuclear weapons.
De-siloing Existential Threats III: Future Pathways to a World Beyond Nuclear Deterrence is a report based on BASIC’s Emerging Voices Network (EVN) policy cycle. Starting in January 2024, 22 EVN members in four focus groups collaborated on a series of workshops utilising foresight methodologies to envisage multiple pathways to a world without nuclear weapons. Foresight methodology is a systematic process that combines strategic planning, intelligence gathering, and vision-building to help decision-makers understand and shape future possibilities by exploring different outcomes.
The focus groups envisaged multiple potential future pathways to a world beyond nuclear deterrence, and then used them to inform policy recommendations. These policy recommendations, future scenarios, and their final notes were then used by BASIC Policy Fellow Declan Penrose to write this report.
Funded by Ploughshares, this report includes fascinating future pathways imagined by EVN members who comprise some of the brightest young nuclear experts in the world. This is the third report in our de-siloing series of policy cycles, which have all been completed in collaboration with Ploughshares. Previous reports include De-siloing Existential Threats: Challenging Identity, Power and Inclusivity in the Nuclear Policy Field and De-siloing Existential Threats II: Tackling the Interconnections Between Global Dangers. Both looked at de-siloing as a means of providing a better understanding of how to reduce the risk of nuclear war.
The focus groups were tasked with imagining favourable and unfavourable future scenarios and detailing how they could become reality. Multiple pathways were then used to create robust policy recommendations with both the favourable and unfavourable outcomes in mind. It is imperative to read the report to discover how the next generation of nuclear experts thinks we could achieve a world without nuclear weapons, and how there are desirable and undesirable routes to this destination.
The focus groups used the foresight tools Futures Wheels, Scenario Development, Visioning, Integrating Scenarios, and Roadmapping to develop their final scenarios. Workshop exercises provided members with guidance on how to use these tools to further develop their scenarios.
Read the report below:
