This commentary collection compiles 15 articles by 18 ELN network members and external collaborators as part of the ELN’s Protecting the Non-Proliferation Treaty project. The collection was originally published for the 2024 NPT Preparatory Committee.
ELN Director Sir Adam Thomson announces that he will step down from his role at the end of 2024.
Most analyses of the effects of nuclear war focus on the impacts in terms of casualties and climate shocks. But there would be many second-order and third-order effects on political, social, and economic systems. Sir Adam Thomson and Paul Ingram write that it is imperative to avoid a nuclear war. If all such efforts fail, we need to understand what it would mean for global civilisation and what we could start to do to prepare.
Listen to the first episode of the NEVER podcast – Ok, Doomer! In this episode, we explore the basics of man-made existential risk, featuring an introduction to the topic, its relationship to great power competition, how governments have dealt with potential existential risks such as the Cuban Missile Crisis, and how they should respond to them in future.
The ELN’s Director, Sir Adam Thomson, spoke at this year’s Effective Altruism conference on the nature of the catastrophic and existential risks we face, including nuclear risks. He discusses how they are meaningfully different from those of 60 years ago, and how we should reassess how we tackle the single greatest driver of them, great power competition.
Today the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists have announced the Doomsday Clock 2023 and how close we are to midnight. We asked some of our network members what can be done to turn back the clock and avert a man-made global catastrophe.