A gathering of secular and religious thinkers with diverse opinions on nuclear disarmament and deterrence will take place Saturday at the University of New Mexico. The event is co-sponsored by the Institute for Advanced Catholic Studies at the University of Southern California, the UNM Endowed Chair of Catholic Studies, and by the UNM Religious Studies program. KUNM’s Megan Kamerick spoke with the institute chair, Richard Wood, who is also a professor at UNM.
RICHARD WOOD: Nuclear experts these days think that today, we might be closer to nuclear Armageddon than we have been at any point for the last 30 or 40 years, and yet there's almost no broad public discussion of that reality, nuclear policy, how we avoid nuclear Armageddon. There's lots of expert discussion, but very little really good, broad public discussion. And in the 1980s the Catholic church actually sponsored the deepest public discussion of these issues that has ever really happened for decades in the country. So the idea here is to rebuild that conversation. And we think that matters. The Catholic Church is a quarter of the American population, and thinks broadly about all kinds of issues facing American society. And we think bringing together the Catholic pro-disarmament voice and the policymakers who believe in nuclear deterrence into a room to really push each other's thinking, to think more deeply together is going to benefit everybody.
KUNM: Are there going to be people from the National Labs there as well?
WOOD: Yes, there'll be representatives out of the national labs. There'll be representatives out of Department of State, both current and past, high level policy makers, some really top-level people.
KUNM: And what are the goals of the event? This
WOOD: One event is not going to change either American nuclear policy or Catholic teaching. That's not the idea. What we do hope is to begin a much deeper dialog between people who think very differently about these issues, and for that kind of deep dialog to happen among people who disagree with each other, at this moment in American life, where disagreements tend to just blow up, it's going to take some deep trust, some relationships, and we hope this event helps build that conversation, build that trust, build those relationships in ways that become the kind of longer term strategic dialog that can really reshape policy over the long term.
KUNM: Tell me about why we're having it in New Mexico, even though it's USC. Are you the link here?
WOOD: Partly, yeah, I'm a professor of sociology at the University of New Mexico, and the president of this Institute of Advanced Catholic studies at USC. But New Mexico also just makes a lot of sense on its own terms. It's the birthplace of the nuclear age. It's the sort of intellectual center of lots of nuclear design, but also policy thinkers about the nuclear world. New Mexico is also the home of the biggest stockpile of nuclear weapons in the country, many of those deactivated, but still present. And the Catholic Church in New Mexico has taken a very prominent stance in favor of disarmament here in the home of two big national laboratories. And lastly, New Mexico is the home of a lot of communities that have been deeply affected by nuclear production, both Indigenous communities, rural Hispanic and white communities, that have been impacted, either by testing historically or by development and production of nuclear stuff. Those communities need a voice in all this as well, and they will be participating in the event.
KUNM: What do you anticipate being the outcome? What will be done with all this dialog?
WOOD: So we will be recording the whole thing. Folks can attend on the livestream the day of, and we'll be recording that, and we'll make it publicly available afterward. Simply the existence of relationships, and hopefully some trust between people of differing points of view, that's a really important outcome from something like this that we hope will happen. And then we will be taking the presentations and publishing a book of collected essays by people of very, very distinctive points of view in pushing each other's thinking about where American nuclear policy ought to go,
KUNM: You have quite a range of people coming. How were they selected?
WOOD: So what we were shooting for was people who represent a really wide range of views, but who also are capable of the kind of careful, thoughtful conversation on terrain that -- you know, some people offer some very simplistic solutions, but it's very complex terrain and figuring out what the right answer is, but even more so how to get to the right answer, that is how to implement the right answer, that takes people who are willing to really think carefully and listen to other points of view, and that's the folks we've tried to get into the room together.
The Forum on Nuclear Strategy: Disarmament & Deterrence in a Dangerous World takes place Saturday Sept. 7 at the University of New Mexico Student Union building at 1:45 p.m. In-person registrations are filled, but it will also be livestreamed. Find out more here.
