If you missed my advance post on my Sustain What conversation with Laura Grego, a longtime analyst of nuclear war risks, strategies and technologies, here’s your chance to watch and weigh in over the weekend.

There’s little here that is reassuring. Grego, drawing on two decades of deep diving, says:

I would argue that I think things are about as dangerous as they’ve ever been – at least since the Cuban Missile Crisis. The risks of war are higher. There’s a war in Europe that threatens to pull nuclear armed adversaries into direct conflict. All of the nuclear weapons possessing countries are either rebuilding, modernizing, or expanding their arsenals. We have very fraught relationships between the three major nuclear powers – the U.S., Russia and China – and the relationships to manage crises are always really important when things can move as fast as nuclear war…. There is nuclear brinksmanship all over… There’s this idea that nuclear threats are permissible, nuclear threats are a way to achieve political goals.

Here are two more key moments.

Grego described the monumental size of the problem, but stresses there are paths to defusing the “house of dynamite”:

Josh Baran, who led a grassroots-focused campaign around the 1983 ABC movie The Day After, laid out how the network wanted the movie to come and go, but the campaign generated widespread focus:

We discussed how that strategy might be applied to “A House of Dynamite” - brainstorming on how to build a social media campaign encouraging people around the country to fill in the blank (spoiler alert: the film ends as a cliffhanger) by creating short videos positing how it ends up. More on that soon!

So please watch and offer some input.

Here’s the curtain-raiser post with heaps of links to background:

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