BACKGROUND

TalkWorks was set up in 2009 by Anne Piper and Rosie Houldsworth formerly chair and deputy director of the Oxford Research Group (ORG) and closely involved in the group’s pioneering ‘Dialogue With Nuclear Weapons Decision-Makers’ work in the 1980s and 1990 which applied a Quaker-inspired person-centred approach of ‘speaking truth to power’ on the overwhelming issue of nuclear weapons and the nuclear arms race between the West and the Soviet Union.

The catalyst for our thinking of a filmed interviews project on nuclear disarmament was an OpEd in the Wall Street Journal in January 2008 in which four very senior US statesmen spoke up about their concerns that uncontrolled nuclear proliferation was bringing the world to a ‘nuclear tipping point’ and called upon leaders of the nuclear weapons states to cooperate urgently on a concrete programme of multilateral nuclear disarmament, or face the risk of a nuclear cataclysm on a global scale. Then on 5 April 2009 President Barack Obama made his historic announcement in Prague that the USA under his administration would ‘reassert the vision of a world free of nuclear weapons’ and work with Russia and the other nuclear powers to free the world of nuclear threats in the 21st century. This was followed by 300 prominent international figures signing up to a manifesto for ‘Global Zero’ nuclear weapons by the year 2030, and the formation by senior parliamentarians, former military chiefs and defence and foreign secretaries of all-party leadership groups to promote and advance the multilateral nuclear disarmament agenda. This movement came to be known as the ‘nuclear disarmament spring’ of 2010

TALKWORKS

We set up TalkWorks to chart and publicise this new enthusiasm within the political and military establishment to free the world of nuclear weapons, by filming personal interviews with the influential figures driving the disarmament agenda. We chose the name ‘TalkWorks’ in homage to dialogue and to highlight the fact that for the first time in 50 years senior political and military officials were showing themselves willing to talk publicly about what had up until then been the most highly classified and secret of subjects, and to share their privileged knowledge and expertise. For those of us who had been working and campaigning fruitlessly for nuclear disarmament since the 1980s, and even long before, this change of mind at the top came as

The rapidly emerging medium of internet video provided us with a new platform from which to reach a potential audience for our films of thousands, far greater than we could ever have hope to reach with the conferences, reports and books that had previously been the movement’s medium of communication.

THE STORY 2009—2015

With a start-up grant from the Faith Raven Trust and the assistance of a student cameraman we embarked in January 2009 on a pilot project of 9 initial interviews* and posted the resulting films on a dedicated website and YouTube channel. By the end of the year we had joined forces with an independent Oxford-based filmmaker, Andy Russell of Different Films, who raised the quality of the films to a professional standard which attracted further financial support in the form of grants from small UK charitable trusts and individual donors, many of Quaker origin.

By this time we had forged a link with the recently formed UK Parliamentary Top Level Group for Multilateral Nuclear Disarmament & Non-proliferation (TLG) through its convenor Lord (Des) Browne who wrote TalkWorks a letter of endorsement* encouraging other colleagues to be filmed for the project.  In May 2011 we were invited to film an important event in Westminster organised under the joint auspices of the US Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI) and the European Leadership Network (ELN) for Henry Kissinger, George Shultz, William Perry and Sam Nunn representing their newly formed Nuclear Security Project to present a screening in London of their film ‘Nuclear Tipping Point’ to UK parliamentarians, leading NGOs and other independent experts and lead a discussion. TalkWorks produced a full-length film of the event and a short trailer entitled Three Friends Went to London which has been used to promote the the NTI message in America, and elsewhere.

In April 2010 we had made our own 20-minute promotional film & DVD entitled ‘Signs for Hope’ specially designed to raise awareness of and stimulate discussion on the topic of nuclear disarmament among younger people. It draws on our interviews with politicians and  senior experts, interweaving their voices with those of students whom we approached in Oxford University Parks to ask them what they knew about nuclear weapons, and to talk about their hopes and vision for the future, (DVD available for £5+P&P from TalkWorks).

But by late 2011 it was already becoming clear that the initiative was losing steam. We interviewed one of the senior Top Level Group members at that time, Liberal Democrat politician Sir Menzies Campbell, who suggested the reasons why. Some of our earlier contributors, including Scilla Elworthy in her 2009 interview, had warned that Obama’s bold disarmament initiative would ‘meet a wall of opposition’ and be beset by difficulties, and so it turned out.

We then sought to discover the exact nature and extent of these difficulties from people with long experience in the field, first from former Swedish foreign minister and weapons inspector Dr Hans Blix whose interview we present as four short films under the general title ‘Blix on Disarmament’.  We then returned to nonagenarian UK nuclear historian Dr Lorna Arnold OBE (1915—2014) and asked her to reflect on the past, present and future of the nuclear age as seen from her unique perspective of having lived through it all from its earliest beginnings, from inside the nuclear industry, charting its history in her books. We presented her simple, wise, deeply informed and sobering reflections in three short TalkWorks Specials.

We also returned in 2013 to Lord Rees OM and Professor Paul Rogers to ask them to reflect on developments since we first interviewed them in 2010.  Martin Rees is Britain’s foremost scientist, a cosmologist and astrophysicist, the Astronomer Royal and former president of the Royal Society, who at the time of filming our second interview was coming to the end of his term as Master of Trinity College Cambridge. We interviewed him in the Great Drawing Room at Trinity beneath the imposing portraits of Sir Isaac Newton, Galileo and Queen Elizabeth I about the ideas expounded in his books ‘Our Final Century?’ (2003) and ‘From Here to Infinity’ (2011).

We filmed Paul Rogers, Professor of Peace Studies at Bradford University and Consultant on Sustainable Security to the Oxford Research Group (ORG), appropriately in the Quaker Meeting House in Oxford talking about the ideas contained in his December 2012 Special Briefing for the Oxford Research Group entitled, ‘Chances for Peace in the Second Decade: What is going wrong and what we must do’.

In the meantime, the four US statesmen who issued the original warnings about a nuclear tipping point in 2008 were publishing further warnings in the WSJ, see: ‘Next Steps in Reducing Nuclear Risks: The Pace of Nonproliferation Work Today Doesn't Match the Urgency of the Threat’, Wall Street Journal, March 6th 2013),

    ‘The continuing risk posed by nuclear weapons remains an overarching strategic problem, but the pace of work doesn't now match the urgency of the threat. The consequences of inaction are potentially catastrophic, and we must continue to ask: How will citizens react to the chaos and suffering of a nuclear attack? Won't they demand to know what could have been done to prevent this? Our age has stolen fire from the gods. Can we confine this awesome power to peaceful purposes before it consumes us?’

In July 2013 we requested another interview with Lord Browne whom we had first interviewed in 2010 at the hopeful start of it all as the original convenor of the TLG, who became a driving force behind the subsequent creation of other leadership networks for nuclear disarmament in major regions of the world—the ELN in Europe, the APLN in the Asia-Pacific, the LALN in Latin-America. He had co-chaired the all-party UK Trident Commission set up to review Britain’s nuclear policy which had just published their report recommending the renewal of Trident, so we asked him for his personal feelings about the outcome of the review, and for his overall assessment of the multilateral disarmament agenda over the past 5 years and its prospects in the future. We wanted to know if he saw any signs for hope in spite of the setbacks he had encountered. His responses to our questions can be seen in 4 parts here.

In June 2014 we ‘climbed to the top of the mountain’ to interview the ‘guru’ of peace and disarmament: former Catholic priest and leading light in the campaign for peace and nuclear disarmament (CND) and for the abolition of war (MAW) since the 1980s, Bruce Kent. Bruce has been passionately promoting the cause of nuclear abolition and and an end to war and militarism, both in his personal life and in his writing and campaigning, for decades, and been a thorn in the side of the UK political establishment for decades. But he was nevertheless described by a former Chief Foreign Correspondent of the right-wing British newspaper The Telegraph as ‘the most principled and consistent figure in British public life’ and ‘a pillar of our great national tradition of political radicalism’. In his eighties he continues to travel the country speaking up for an end to Trident, and the madness of nuclear weapons and war. His interview is inspiring and uncompromising and can be seen in 4 parts HERE.

WHERE WE ARE NOW

We have concluded our series of ‘Talking About Nuclear Disarmament’ now with filmed interviews with two Nobel Peace Prize nominees fired with the moral and practical imperative of finding a way to build peace and security in the world without nuclear weapons through cooperation among nations and binding international treaties. They have both devoted their working lives to researching, developing and proposing alternative strategies to political leaders, and supporting them to make make wiser decisions

Jonathan Granoff is an international lawyer and Sufi teacher who is President of the Global Security Institute, who was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014 for his work to ‘advance the rule of law to address international security and the threats posed by nuclear weapons’. He was in Oxford in May for the annual OxPeace conference on ‘THE UN AT 70’ speaking on the subject of ‘Nuclear weapons and global secure, sustainable development’ at St John’s College, elaborated in a recent article for the International Law News of the American Bar Association (Winter Edition 2015) entitled ‘Global Common Goals and Goods: Security and Realism’,

‘The footprints of science, technology, and human social organization have never disturbed the natural world as intensely as they do today. Their impact has created many threats unique to the twenty-first century, and we must recalibrate the way security is pursued. The threats ignore national boundaries, and they cannot be met without global cooperation and the rule of law. Policies inconsistent with that cooperation must be challenged, and new thinking is critically needed’.

In his interview, posted on TalkWorks’ Home Page and on YouTube, he sets out his vision for a global security framework for the 21st century, in which nuclear weapons are rendered obsolete and illegal under international law.

Dr Scilla Elworthy pioneered the early dialogue with nuclear weapons decision-makers work out of which TalkWorks grew and for which she was awarded the Niwano Peace Prize in 2003. She has also been nominated three times for the Nobel Peace Prize, and was recently invited to address a private seminar hosted by the UK Ministry of Defence’s Development, Concepts and Doctrine Centre (DCDC) and the University of Oxford Changing Character of War Programme at Merton College on the subject of ‘Making deterrence work in the 21st Century’. Her argument, which she summarises in our interview on TalkWorks’ Home Page and on YouTube and elaborates in an Oxford Research Group briefing entitled ‘Beyond Deterrence: Rethinking UK security Doctrine’, is that deterrence simply cannot be made to work in the 21st century,

    ‘The explosion of research into human psychology over the past 30 years has demonstrated beyond doubt that we delude ourselves if we assume human beings to be rational. Deterrence theory assumes human beings to be rational. To base a strategy employing unimaginable destructive power on a false assumption is inexcusably dangerous. It should be wrapped in its opaque shroud, given a decent burial, and put to rest without delay.’

I am very happy and honoured to give the last word on TalkWorks ‘Talking About Nuclear Disarmament’ to Scilla who first inspired me to take the path of ‘talking truth to power’ rather than protesting angrily and hopelessly against nuclear weapons 33 years ago, and who devotes her life to building peace.

Thank you from the TalkWorks team.

Rosie Houldsworth              Anne Piper                            Andy Russell

Co-founder & coordinator        Co-founder & adviser              Project associate & cameraman

OXFORD, UK

FEBRUARY 2016

*In March 2011 Lord Browne, convenor of the UK Parliamentary Top Level Group for MultilateralNuclear Disarmament and Non-Proliferation wrote a  letter  endorsing TalkWorks as:

     “an excellent medium to disseminate the message of nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation to a wider audience”