September 20, 2024
The Program on Science and Global Security (SGS) began marking its 50th anniversary with a special five-week exhibition “Close Encounters: Facing the Bomb in a New Nuclear Age”. It is on display at the Bernstein Gallery in Robertson Hall, home of the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs. The “Close Encounters: Facing the Bomb in a New Nuclear Age” exhibition brochure is available here. The exhibition launch included the Bruce Blair Memorial Lecture 2024.
The centerpiece of the exhibition is the bomb, a 60 minute multimedia piece on 45 screens by Smriti Keshari and Eric Schlosser ’81. It immerses viewers in the story of nuclear weapons from 1945 to today’s nuclear arms race. It uses archival film, animation and music to bring into view weapons and risks as machines and systems that often are hidden but pose an existential global threat. A link to the trailer is available here.
The installation design is inspired by nuclear weapon command-and-control centers. It evokes the technological fallibility of systems of machines and people, the devastating consequences of errors and malfunctions, and the inherent impossibility of control.
The exhibition also includes two short films produced by and for SGS.
Plan A is a 4-minute animation based on an SGS simulation of escalating war between the United States and Russia. It uses realistic nuclear force postures, war plans, targets, and fatality estimates based on data sets of nuclear weapons currently deployed and weapon yields. It shows the evolution of the nuclear conflict from tactical to strategic to city-destruction phases. The video now on YouTube has had almost 5 million views and has been reported on in leading publications and tv channels in many countries.
We Must Speak Boldly - Physicists Coalition for Nuclear Threat Reduction is a reflection on current nuclear dangers and a call from scientists for more education and collective action to help address them. This 6-minute film is directed by Smriti Keshari, and supported by SGS. The exhibition is its first public screening.
The film features participants in the Princeton School on Science and Global Security 2023. The Physicists Coalition was founded at SGS in 2019 and works for fulfillment of the long-standing international obligation to achieve nuclear disarmament.
The exhibition also features eight large infographic panels by SGS that provide up-to-date information on the risks of nuclear weapons and nuclear materials, the local and global long-term effects of nuclear weapon use, the U.S. nuclear weapons modernization plan and its expected costs, and the status of current disarmament efforts, including the 2017 UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.
These panels were first developed by SGS and featured in the exhibition Shadows and Ashes: The Peril of Nuclear Weapons at the Bernstein Gallery (November 6, 2017 – February 1, 2018), which was accompanied by a panel discussion “A Perpetual Menace: Nuclear Weapons Today, Tomorrow, Forever?” with Bruce Blair, Sharon Weiner, and Ambassador Elayne Whyte Gomez, who led the negotiations in 2017 of the United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.
SGS extends a special thanks to Lina Kavaliunas, curator of the Bernstein Gallery and the teams from the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs who supported the exhibition.