Reinventing Civil Defense is a project at the College of Arts and Letters at the Stevens Institute of Technology, funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, running from 2017-2021.
Its goal is to develop new communication strategies regarding nuclear risk that have high potential to resonate with a public audience. Building on the prior history of Civil Defense, we will identify what an effective, non-partisan, level-headed approach to nuclear risk communication looks like in the 21st century.
Broadly speaking, our principal investigators — Alex Wellerstein and Kristyn Karl — working with the guidance of an Advisory Committee and the Carnegie Corporation of New York, organized two workshops on the past, present, and future of nuclear risk communication. A key element of the project is funding several pilot and/or prototyping projects that have served as focal points in our investigation.
More information is available here at the project website.
Some of the written work by Alex Wellerstein related to this project includes:
- “What We Lost When We Lost Bert the Turtle,” Harper’s Magazine (December 2017).
- (with Kristyn Karl and Ashley Lytle), “A nuclear bomb might not kill you. But not knowing how to respond might,” Washington Post (14 January 2019).
- “The Hawaii alert was an accident. The dread it inspired wasn’t,” The Washington Post (16 January 2018).