Entering the Third Age of Nuclear Weapons
We’re now entering the Third Age of Nuclear Weapons, 70 years after the first bomb dropped on Japan. Paul Saffo, the renowned technology forecaster, provided this framework, the perfect one for the opening roundtable of the Reinvent Nuclear Security series, as well as for the series as a whole.
The First Age of the superpowers lasted from 1945 until 1989. The Second Age of the aspiring powers expanded the nation states with the bomb. This Third Age of loose nukes, ones that are at risk of getting in the hands of terrorists, arguably is the most dangerous of all. Saffo argued that we need new ideas, possibly based on new technologies, more than ever before.
This opening roundtable on Possible Game-Changing Technologies provided a great start. We had a terrific group of folks with diverse technology backgrounds who helped us think ahead about what technologies will become… expand
Never Underestimate the Disruptive Power of New Technologies
New technologies have disrupted a wide range of fields in the last couple decades – from media to business to politics. Again and again they have enabled vastly superior 21st-century models to supersede old systems that proved to be obsolete.
Might the field of nuclear weapons security be next?
This first roundtable in our series will look far and wide at emerging technologies available now that could immediately improve the conventional way of doing business in today’s nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation field. We will also look at technologies coming within the next decade that could fundamentally change the game in ways that few people are expecting.
Many new technologies coming out of Silicon Valley today that already are transforming other fields might be applied in creative ways to the nuclear security field.