Author: Reinventing Civil Defense project

We’re excited to announce the Reinventing Civil Defense Poster Contest! Click here for the details. Deadline: July 16, 2019. Please feel free to share widely.

The Reinventing Civil Defense Project is happy to announce we are soliciting a second round of proposals for funding. This is to develop sub-projects that will help to increase our understanding of the possibilities of raising nuclear salience.

You can read the current request for proposals (RPF) here: https://reinventingcivildefense.org/projects/rfp/

Submissions are due by 5:00PM EST on Monday, November 5, 2018. Please feel free to submit earlier or get in touch earlier, if desired.

A discussion of the intentions of these sub-projects can be found in the post about the previous RFP found here. A description of projects funded by the previous RFP can be found here. This should not be taken as an indication of the full range of possible projects we might fund, but it does give some sense of what a successful proposal in the past looked like, and the dollar amounts associated with them.

While all manners of projects may still be submitted, for this round we are especially interested in projects that involve new media (broadly construed).

Communications  and questions about this should be addressed to reinventingcivildefense@stevens.edu. Please feel free to distribute this RFP broadly.

The Reinventing Civil Defense Project, after soliciting requests for funding and getting feedback from its Advisory Committee, has chosen to fund the following projects after competitive review:

Drawing Doomsday: Using Comics for Civil Defense
Jonathan Fetter-Vorm

Civil Defense publications from the 1950s often used comics to communicate the complex threats of nuclear warfare in a way that was dramatic and easy to understand. But these pamphlets were also woefully inadequate to the severity of the subject matter. They glossed over the potential devastation and trauma of a nuclear attack, and they never showed the bleak aftermath. As such, these early attempts at educational comics read like quaint exercises in propaganda.

Nevertheless, a reinvented Civil Defense could still benefit from the tools of visual storytelling. Comics can be a powerful way to communicate the complexity of nuclear risk to young readers. I propose creating a brief narrative in comics form – using a current DHS scenario for a nuclear device detonated in an urban area – as well as several alternate versions of the same narrative, each with a slightly different framing device. The result will be a set of variations on a theme that educators could use to gauge the effectiveness of different modes of storytelling for teaching their students about nuclear threats. Knowing this will help graphic novelists tune their material to the needs of young readers, for whom nuclear salience is a distant abstraction.

Investigating the Effects of Nuclear Knowledge on Citizen Attitudes toward the Use of Nuclear Weapons
Lisa Koch and Matthew Wells

Can citizen attitudes toward the use of nuclear weapons be moderated through citizen education? Recent research has found that a significant proportion of the American public is willing to approve the use of nuclear weapons in defense of U.S. interests. U.S. President Donald Trump’s public statements regarding the American nuclear arsenal and the North Korean nuclear program have renewed public debate over the potential use of nuclear weapons against foreign enemies. We plan to determine if there are factors not yet addressed in studies of nuclear attitudes that heighten citizens’ appreciation of nuclear risk and mediate their willingness to use nuclear weapons. We will conduct a series of experiments to test whether either of two selected factors influences nuclear attitudes: a detailed explanation of the uniquely devastating effects of a nuclear blast, and the risk of retaliation by a nuclear-armed adversary.

Nuclear Worriers: Stories from a Nuclear World
Alton Lu and Tammy Nguyen

Nuclear Worriers is a podcast and network for communicating stories relating to nuclear risk and salience among the public. Nuclear Worriers is a mechanism to identify whether podcasting is a sufficient medium for discussing complex issues for a more time-consumed population. We want to utilize existing research about risk communication – namely using imagined scenarios and stories – to build an audience that is receptive to the nature of nuclear risk. The goal is to test the podcast format as a way to communicate civil defense.

The Nuclear Plays
Anthony P. Pennino

The Nuclear Plays will consist of a series of interlocking one-act plays that could be performed individually or together as a full evening of theatre. They will be written specifically for performance by high schools and colleges to contribute to ongoing conversations in and out of the classroom on nuclear salience. The one-acts will be divided into three sets. The first set (“Before”) will form the first half of the full theatrical event and will remain unchanged. “Before” will concern the days leading up to a possible nuclear exchange between nations and told from the perspective of high school/college students. The second part of the evening would involve a conversation between performers, audience members, teachers, and students: what are the risks of conflict? what are the likely outcomes? how prepared are we (or could ever be) to survive such a conflict? what are our responsibilities in now in understanding and preparing for a world after nuclear conflict? Based upon that conversation, the performers can decide which of the remaining two sets to perform for the evening’s third portion. “After A” will follow a series of events where nuclear war is avoided while “After B” will investigate a post-nuclear war.

Mark 17 User’s Manual
Peter Rickwood, Kirstie Shepherd, and Cesare Asaro

The first airborne hydrogen bomb in America was the massive Mark 17, at  42,000 pounds possibly the most powerful ever made. An unarmed Mark 17 accidentally fell from a bomber near Albuquerque NM in 1957.  Newer weapons are much smaller. The Mark 17 was larger than life and lends itself to the dark sweep of a graphic fictional operation and maintenance guide. A 1950’s-style manual of the kind gathering dust in grandpa’s attic, would find a new lease of life informing its audience about nuclear weapons. The project will lead an audience into the apocalyptic realm of nuclear weapons illustrating stark evidence of the risks and dangers.

This user’s manual not only offers instruction on maintaining such weapons — consider the estimated $1.3 trillion US modernization program — it also examines the impact of the weapons: treatment of radiation poisoning and severe burns; nuclear winter; climate change, among other topics. The project will be driven by two talented artists, who have created a number of graphic print and online books, and a veteran nuclear communicator. The model for the product is a successful manual for a 1950’s time machine, the Gadabout TM 1050. As a template it provides a number of possibilities for offering education and information about nuclear weapons.

There were also three non-competitive (in-house) projects funded through separate lines of funding:

NUKEMAP-VR
Seth Cluett, Christopher Manzione, and Alex Wellerstein

NUKEMAP-VR will develop a virtual environment that explores and simulates nuclear weapons effects. Coded in Unity, and designed for platforms such as the Oculus Rift, Gear VR, or Google Cardboard, the program will allow a user to experience a 3D nuclear detonation from the vantage point of a nearby witness. In its first iteration, we will create an application that allows the visualization of an arbitrarily-sized nuclear detonation occurring in midtown Manhattan, as viewed from someone standing across the Hudson River at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, NJ.  This prototype will serve as a pilot study for measuring user reactions and determining the most effective way to use virtual reality technology as a tool to raise nuclear salience. Future iterations of this project will allow expansion in terms of viewer location, city of detonation, and weapon yield.

Evaluating the Effectiveness of Nuclear Risk Communication Tools
Kristyn Karl and Ashley Lytle

The average American has little awareness of nuclear threats and, in the event of a nuclear detonation, is ill-prepared to take the actions needed to save preventable casualties (including their own). Broadly, research in psychology, communication studies, and political science has demonstrated that risk communications designed to influence the general public often fail. More narrowly, our understanding of the effectiveness and impact of existing communication tools regarding nuclear risk is woefully inadequate. Which types of communication attempts about nuclear threats promote message acceptance and increased knowledge? How can we communicate nuclear risk in a way that increases its salience in the minds of the public, shifts threat perception, and/or leads to a willingness to take action? This project seeks to leverage the causal power of experiments to quantitatively evaluate and compare the impact of existing communication tools regarding nuclear risk, leveraging emotional responses and individual characteristics, to determine the most effective tools under varying contexts. Ultimately, this project will serve as an important basis for comparison between existing communication tools and new tools developed in the future.

(This project is being generously funded through the aid of the Thompson Family Foundation.)

Game Development for Civil Defense
Nicholas O’Brien, Alex Wellerstein, and Susanna Pollack

The use of “serious games” for increasing understanding, awareness, and salience on issues of social import has been pursued on many different topics for several years now. Our project involves the creation of a “serious game” idea-laboratory at the Stevens Institute of Technology, harnessing the game development capabilities of the Visual Arts & Technology program and the subject-matter expertise of the Science and Technology Studies program, combined with the oversight and influence of the experienced Games for Change organization. The goal would be to lead students in miniature game studios to rapidly prototype game ideas for enhancing nuclear salience in a Civil Defense context, with the goal of identifying promising avenues for using this media as a means for engaging Millennials in particular.

A substantial amount of the funding for the Reinventing Civil Defense Project is earmarked for sub-projects that will help to increase our understanding of the possibilities of raising nuclear salience.

The form of these projects is intentionally vague. A few of the ideas suggested in our original funding proposal include:

• A virtual-reality experience for understanding the scale and scope of nuclear weapons
• Targeted histories of the American and Soviet Civil Defense experiences, with a focus on their successes and failures at raising salience
• A meta-review paper of the psychological/sociological literature on how messaging and training changes risk awareness and perception over the long-term
• Explorations into the mediums of theater, graphic novels, video games, etc., as a means of raising nuclear salience

These are meant to be suggestive of the breadth of the scope we are interested in. These projects would have to be “completed” to some degree on a relatively short (in most cases, under 1 year) timescale, and so many of these may only be projects to create “suggestive prototypes” that we can use in our workshops and discussions.

If you are interested, please click here to read the full Request for Proposals. Note that submissions are due by 5:00PM EST on Friday, October 20, 2017. We have tried to intentionally keep the amount of application materials to a minimum. Funding decisions will be made by our Advisory Committee.

If you have questions, please contact reinventingcivildefense@gmail.com; we are happy to give more information and clarify anything that is unclear here.

Applicants need not be academics, or in or affiliated with academic institutions.

Please also note that we have added a “subscription” widget for our News feed. This will send you e-mail updates whenever a post like this is published; it will not be used for any other form of communication, and can be unsubscribed to at any time (it is a service of WordPress.com).

Saber-rattling, ICBM tests, and tough-talk from Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un have resulted in an unusual amount of discussion about the possibilities of a nuclear attack against the United States. The Principal Investigators of the Reinventing Civil Defense Project have been featured in several national and international news stories about nuclear preparedness, nuclear fear, and nuclear salience.

Below is a sampling from last week’s press coverage:

Lizzie Johnson, “Can SF plan for surviving a North Korean nuclear strike?” San Francisco Chronicle (8 August 2017):

Public awareness is an important aspect of defense, said Alex Wellerstein, a nuclear weapons historian and assistant professor at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, N.J. He recently started Reinventing Civil Defense, a nonprofit that seeks to renew public education efforts about nuclear threats. 

The chances of North Korea being able to target San Francisco and score a direct hit are still low, because Pyongyang hasn’t tested whether its missiles can reliably carry the weight of a nuclear warhead, Wellerstein said. But a near-hit would be bad enough — a missile striking anywhere on the mainland U.S. would probably kill thousands. 

“There are a few cities and counties that have tried to reach out to the public, but it is still very rare and somewhat idiosyncratic,” Wellerstein said. “Ventura County has been doing this for a few years now. … It has attracted some attention and some ridicule. Is this effective? I don’t know.”

Casey Tolan and Matthias Gafni, “North Korean threats make Bay Area ponder the unthinkable: a nuclear attack,” The Mercury News (9 August 2017):

Julie Pullen, a professor at Stevens Institute of Technology who studies civil defense issues, said dramatic headlines about North Korea provided a good chance for officials to spread the word about best practices in the unlikely event of an attack. “I don’t think this is an imminent threat,” Pullen said, “but it’s an opportunity for people to learn about nuclear weapons, particularly younger people who didn’t grow up in the Cold War.”

Robinson Meyer, “Nuclear Anxiety Returns to America,” The Atlantic (12 August 2017): 

Kristyn Karl, a professor of political science at Stevens Institute of Technology, agreed that the public’s interest in nuclear weapons was way up—even if their understanding wasn’t. “The public is currently more aware of nuclear threats than they have been since the end of the Cold War,” she told me in an email.

That doesn’t mean they know much about them.

Americans flunk questions about basic nuclear security, Karl said, “such as identifying nuclear states, the scale of nuclear arsenals, etc.” Younger Americans also have little experience with nuclear weapons, especially compared with Baby Boomers.

Alex Wellerstein, a historian of nuclear weapons, also at the Stevens Institute, agreed that people seem more interested now. But he worries that they won’t stay that way once this crisis passes.

“It’s clear there is a sharp uptick of interest on nuclear questions,” he said in an email. “The question is, what kind of interest is it? Is it the kind of interest that will lead to a more sustained public interest on these topics? Or is it an ephemeral fear of the sort that comes and goes in a crisis?”

The Reinventing Civil Defense project was featured in a news story by Ralph Vartabedian and W.J. Hennigan in the Los Angeles Times, “Duck and cover 2.0: How North Korea is prompting new efforts to prepare for a nuclear attack.” An excerpt is below.

Fleets of big black trucks, harbor boats and aircraft, equipped with radiation sensors and operated by specially trained law enforcement teams, are ready to swing into action in Los Angeles for a catastrophe that nobody even wants to think about: a North Korean nuclear attack.

American cities have long prepared for a terrorist attack, even one involving nuclear weapons or a “dirty bomb,” but North Korea’s long-range missile and weapons programs have now heightened concerns along the West Coast over increasing vulnerability to a strike. […]

As tension rises, the inevitable question is: How well prepared are Los Angeles and other U.S. cities for a nuclear strike? The answer is somewhat unexpected. After two decades of fighting terrorism, law enforcement agencies and the federal government today are better equipped and trained to handle the aftermath of a limited nuclear attack than they ever were during the Cold War. Yet generations of Americans have grown up without learning how to protect themselves in the aftermath of a detonation. […]

This month, Wellerstein and other researchers launched Reinventing Civil Defense, a nonprofit project that over the next two years will examine how best to reeducate the American public on the nuclear threat — one that never went away. It is being funded by a $500,000 grant from Carnegie Corp. of New York.

“If we live in a world where a nuclear detonation is possible, and we do, then people should be informed on what that means,” he said. “It’s something that’s been nonexistent in our society since the late 1980s.”

Click here for the full story.

The Reinventing Civil Defense project, at the Stevens Institute of Technology, has been created thanks to a grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York (CCNY). It is one of 11 projects funded by a joint effort between the CCNY and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation “to support projects aimed at reducing nuclear risk through innovative and solutions-oriented approaches.”

Reinventing Civil Defense is a project dedicated to developing new communication strategies regarding nuclear risk. It brings together a diverse group of experts from academia, government, public policy, entertainment, journalism, and the arts, and will seek to fund many smaller sub-projects that will serve as focal points for thinking about how to increase “nuclear salience” — the lived experience of nuclear weapons risks — among a variety of audiences.

The principal investigators are three faculty members at Stevens from different disciplines: Kristyn Karl, an assistant professor of political science; Julie Pullen, an associate professor of oceanography and meteorology; and Alex Wellerstein, an assistant professor of Science and Technology Studies and a historian of science. They will coordinate interdisciplinary investigations crossing through the social sciences, the arts, science communication, and the physical sciences.

Reinventing Civil Defense gets its name in reference to the Cold War policies of Civil Defense, which were attempted by various governments, notably the United States, to educate their citizens on the means by which they could improve their survivability in the event of a nuclear detonation or nuclear war. It is often associated with the “Duck and Cover” drills of the 1950s, or the fallout shelters of the 1960s. Civil Defense became increasingly controversial and politically polarized over the course of the Cold War: opposed by some as misleading and complacent, invoked by others as a moral and strategic necessity, the policies died a quiet death in the late 1980s. With the end of the Cold War, US governmental efforts at Civil Defense essentially ended, being transformed into the discipline of Emergency Management.

The Reinventing Civil Defense project deliberately invokes Civil Defense, despite its controversies, for several reasons. For one, Civil Defense programs embodied a major way in which American citizenry understood and encountered the real questions of nuclear risk in the Cold War. “Duck and Cover,” for example, was not merely about hiding under desks — it was about internalizing the reality that nuclear war was possible, and perhaps even likely. This is a sensibility that, with the end of the Cold War, is entirely missing from younger generations of Americans, despite the fact that nuclear risks still remain.

Second, we are also interested specifically in exploring what level-headed, non-partisan, empirically-informed approaches to Civil Defense might look like in the 21st century, especially with respects to single-city nuclear detonations (e.g., nuclear terrorism, or single missile attacks), as opposed to the all-out nuclear war scenarios of the Cold War. It would be a mistake to assume that the Civil Defense strategies of the 1950s and 1960s would work today: trust in government is lower, technological infrastructure has in many cases changed dramatically, and the nature of the threat has also changed.