Eliminating nuclear weapons depends, crucially, on changing the way we see them. Our fundamental insight is that nuclear weapons are important, but not because they are great weapons. They are too big, too clumsy, too messy to be great weapons. They are important because they are the currency of power. They are today’s symbol of greatness.

The difficulty with currencies of power is that — like monetary currencies — they can get over-inflated. Like battleships before World War II, like cavalry before World War I, like chariots in the ancient world — weapons can have reputations that outrun their actual utility. The reputation of nuclear weapons has grown out of all proportion with reality. 

What if it were possible to collapse the market value of nuclear weapons? What if you could devalue them as a currency of power? What if we could shrink their size as symbols? Then nuclear weapons would be revealed as simply clumsy, dangerous technology. Like a stove that won’t boil water and explodes with alarming frequency, nuclear weapons would go from status symbol to unwanted technology. Why would anyone keep any sort of technology that is both virtually useless and very dangerous?

Nuclear weapons are said to be the gold standard of security. Gold, remember, was a symbol of economic stability that supposedly held the financial world order together. It was “essential,” experts said. But when Great Britain and the United States left the gold standard, it turned out their economies continued to thrive — or even worked better — off the gold standard. Gold was a symbol, not a reality. Nuclear weapons are gold: they are symbols with virtually no practical value. Giving up a symbol — like gold or nuclear weapons — is entirely feasible.

The way we give up a symbol is to educate ourselves and others as to the facts. 

We are looking for people willing to absorb the facts about this important subject and then communicate those facts simply and pragmatically to others.