Emma Claire Foley on nuclear weapons, defense conversion, and meeting people's needs
"...away from this totalizing militarism and toward a more livable future"
Emma Claire Foley is a writer and researcher whose work focuses on the economics and politics of nuclear weapons. She's also a healthcare organizer and a member of NYC DSA. She lives in New York.
How did you get interested in and involved in nuclear policy?
It was a pretty roundabout way. I started out as a Russian language student and a languages person. My first goal when I was in college was to become a linguist, which I quickly gave up. But I ended up studying area studies for Eastern Europe and history.
Then I found myself in Ukraine during 2013 and 2014 during the Maidan Revolution and the first Russian invasion. It was pretty eye-opening. At the time, I was living in the east in Zaporizhzhia, where you've heard about the nuclear plant attack, one of the two big ones. That's a big steel industry area, and industrial area in general. It was incredibly polluted, really just overwhelming, but at the same time it's also known as a center of natural beauty, so it's a weird mix. I got really interested when I was there in how the government was not able to meet the needs that people had living in an area that was so polluted, so private companies were meeting those needs in ways that filled a space that could be filled in in a way that met everyone's needs equitably. This is a familiar argument.
So that was something that was interesting to me, but then the political aspect of it really took over. Then I came back to the States and went to grad school. I got interested in Chernobyl, again from the environmental aspect. It really started to feel like if you wanted to think about environmental issues in Ukraine and Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union, you had to think about Chernobyl and its effects on the way that the post-Soviet states in that area were formed. So that was what I did. Then there was a somewhat natural transition, natural now that I look back on it, to thinking about nuclear weapons. I started working in disarmament four years ago, and I've been there ever since.
Can you explain why that's a natural transition? What's the connection between nuclear energy and nuclear weapons?
There are different ways you can articulate the connection. I think you see in reporting about this stuff there's an equivalency drawn where the risks inherent to nuclear power are equated to the risks of nuclear weapons, and vice versa, which is something I definitely don't want to do; they're definitely different issues. But when you think about them from the perspective of how does having a nuclear energy program affect how a state behaves, what relationship does that have to a nuclear weapons program, the range of issues you start to think about are very similar.
Another angle on this that I'm interested in is defense conversion. There's this broad general argument, that's been kind of left by the wayside for the past few decades, that we can transfer funding, but also industrial capacity and in the case of nuclear weapons, materials, from a military application to a civilian application. So one thing I'm really interested in, and I've written some on this, is times when that did happen. Following the reduction in arsenals in the late eighties, the end of the Soviet Union, there was an agreement between the US and Russia where nuclear material from those weapons was used to fuel nuclear power plants. It’s a treaty that nobody thinks about, even if you're someone who thinks about treaties, but it's regarded as successful. I think it's a really good model, one among many that we could draw on when we're thinking about how to address climate change and especially the geopolitical aspects of climate change in the near future.
What do you think about nuclear energy more broadly in terms of the energy transition to address the climate crisis?
My approach to nuclear energy is pretty pragmatic. We have already mined a lot of the materials we use for nuclear weapons, as well as nuclear energy, at great cost to the communities that have existed near these mines, have worked in these mines. What if we made the best use of the materials we already have? That's why the transition from nuclear weapons to nuclear energy is really interesting to me. What if we took these weapons that use this immensely valuable material to constantly threaten to wreak total destruction and destabilize our politics in this way that we're all seeing so obviously right now, what if we used that to make the transition away from fossil fuels easier and faster? When I talk about nuclear energy, when I talk about renewable energy, that's what I try to focus on: all of these sources of energy have pluses and minuses. I think there are ways to widen the number of options we have as we think about how to do this transition, as much as any of this is politically possible in this moment.
The idea of nuclear war has reentered popular consciousness—despite the threat always being there, of course—after receding into the background for a while, with Russia's invasion and the nuclear saber rattling. But it seems like there's been a lot of both implicit and explicit dismissal of the severity of and potential for nuclear war. What do you think that's about?
I did see the sort of memes about how actually nuclear war wouldn't be that bad. I don't really know what to say to that. Yes it would; everything we know about it says that it would be that bad. I think that thinking is a combination of the disconnect that has happened in the past few decades as we sort of come to think about nuclear weapons as a solved problem even though they are not by any stretch of the imagination, as well as an acceptance on some level of the fact that we live with a lot of technologies that have negative effects on our health. That's a calculation you have to make. It's not one that we handle well, by and large. But this is an extreme version of that.
I think that this is a challenge for people who are working on disarmament and also for anybody who wants to approach their politics more holistically in a way that includes nuclear weapons as an issue. From a strategic perspective, pretty much everybody believes that if one country uses a nuclear weapon in a battle, it will probably escalate to a full-scale nuclear exchange. We don't know what that looks exactly, but we do roughly know and it doesn't look good. The projections for the longer term effects of what would happen during a nuclear war, the nuclear winter idea—that it would change the climate and the world's ability to sustain any kind of life—is still valid. It's still a general scenario that we think about when we think about what would happen during a nuclear war.
But this isn't a new problem with people saying, “Well maybe we'd survive it.” I think that one of the reasons that nuclear weapons persist as an aspect of foreign policy, as something that states go to great lengths to maintain and even build new ones, is because the people who are doing that work tend to take that attitude.
You see that in an extreme form at the end of Dr. Strangelove where all the guys in the war room are planning how they’re going to live out the nuclear war and its aftermath. They’re like, “It will be great, it will be fine.” It's really hard for people to think about this issue not from that perspective because it can drive you crazy if you think about the scale of destruction that we're equipped to visit upon the Earth at any point. It’s nuts.
There's some parallels with the climate and ecological crisis where it's kind of hard to wrap your head around.
Exactly. Early models of what climate change would look like were, I believe, drawn from nuclear winter simulations, so there's a deep connection there as we imagine these nightmare scenarios.
Going back to defense conversion, how do you think we can start to build the will to eliminate nuclear weapons and more broadly for disarmament and defense conversion? Particularly now when it seems like this war in Ukraine will be used as yet another excuse for more military buildup.
That's a tough problem. I think the elements are there as I look at it. Polling I've seen from the American public seems fundamentally against the United States getting involved in the conflict. From an analyst perspective, I would say that this conflict is a great example of what the US did not learn from COVID, which is that some situations which require large-scale responses would actually be made worse with a traditional military response. That message does not seem to have gotten through to the people who need to hear it, and we're looking at a defense budget that could top $800 billion, which is pretty terrifying.
But the combination of a sense of restraint, broadly, on the part of Americans looking at this war as well as this continuing core movement of people who are taking a really broad and generous approach to organizing around the most urgent problems we have right now, like things that fall under a climate change response or a Green New Deal. I think that there's plenty of room to address nuclear weapons issues in a way that doesn't wedge it in awkwardly, and I think defense conversion is a really important tool when you're figuring that out. Because it's not just about moving money over from one column to the next, it's about taking this really developed capacity that the United States has to build weapons of war, to maintain this war machine and keep that going, and figure out how and where to apply pressure to make that actually productive, actually something that can meet the needs of people in the United States and elsewhere.
I think if we start to see it as a resource, it can help us think about what's possible in the near term and how to build alliances around pushing for a step-by-step approach away from this totalizing militarism and toward a more livable future. It's obviously a huge job, and I really hope that we see continued resistance to using this awful war as an excuse to pour even more money into the defense industry.
Are there any organizing projects around those sorts of issues, or just anything really, that you're involved in or that you see happening that you find particularly helpful or exciting right now?
I am seeing more attention and more ambition from activists to the expansion of the military industrial complex, to the role that it has played in things like COVID response and any kind of domestic policy. There's a lot that's been said about why and how COVID did or did not give rise to a larger and more powerful movement to change the way the US does politics to reorient towards meeting people's basic needs.
But there is a lot of—in some cases active, in some cases latent—energy around that and a lot of awareness of how counterproductive the status quo is in certain ways. My current research focuses on attitudes toward defense spending in the Midwest and Mountain West, so I'm really grateful, especially as someone who's spent a long time thinking about foreign policy, which I love and is very interesting. To be able to look more deeply at how these issues affect US state-based politics has been awesome and given me quite a bit of hope that we do have people working now who are proposing these concrete, practical ways of re-imagining defense spending, energy infrastructure, things like that. Just this really big, basic stuff.
I think people will respond to that. There's a real appetite for politics that are founded on the importance of meeting people's basic needs and the fundamental questions that we're always grappling with, sharing resources and things like that. I'm not identifying any particular projects here, but I'm generally optimistic about the Green New Deal and anti-militarism organizing that is still continuing. I think there are people who are definitely meeting that challenge.
This interview has been condensed and edited for content and clarity.