From New START to “Limited Nuclear Weapons,” The Debate Is More Urgently Needed Than Ever.

CHICAGO, IL///NEWS ADVISORY///Why should nuclear weapons be a major focus of the 2020 U.S. presidential campaign? Why aren’t they already? On March 2, the day before Super Tuesday, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists will attempt to answer those questions during a live, two-way phone-based briefing open to the media and public at 11 a.m. CST/noon EST/1700 GMT.

The moderated presentation (with full Q&A) is open to members of the news media and the Bulletin, providing a rare opportunity for both reporters and issue experts to pose questions at the same time to a panel.

Presenters will include:

• Former Obama science adviser John P. Holdren, who is now the Teresa and John Heinz Professor of Environmental Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, Co-Director of the School’s Science, Technology, and Public Policy program, Professor of Environmental Science and Policy in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, and Affiliated Professor in the John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Science. He is also Visiting Distinguished Professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China, and Senior Advisor to the President at the Woods Hole Research Center, a pre-eminent scientific think tank focused on global climate change. From January 2009 to January 2017, he was President Obama’s Science Advisor and Senate-confirmed Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP).
• Alexandra Bell, the senior policy director at the Center for Arms Control & Non-Proliferation. Previously, Bell served as a senior adviser in the Office of the Under Secretary for Arms Control and International Security. She has also worked on nuclear policy issues at the Ploughshares Fund and the Center for American Progress.
• John Mecklin, editor-in-chief of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

TO PARTICIPATE:  U.S. participants should dial (toll free) 1-877-418-4267 by no later than 10:55 a.m. CST/11:55 a.m. EST/1655 GMT on March 2nd.  Non-U.S. participants should dial (toll) +1-412-717-9585.  Ask for the “nuclear weapons/2020 election” briefing call.

CAN’T PARTICIPATE: A streaming recording of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ briefing will be available atwww.thebulletin.org/nukes2020vote as of 5 p.m. CST/6 p.m. EST/2300 GMT on March 2, 2020.

EDITOR’S NOTE: For more background information, read Nuclear Weapons Policy and the U.S. Presidential Election, an edition of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists available free online until March 31, 2020.

December 2020 marks the 75th anniversary of the first edition of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, initially a six-page, black-and-white bulletin and later a magazine, created in anticipation that the atom bomb would be “only the first of many dangerous presents from the Pandora’s Box of modern science.”  The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ iconic Doomsday Clock was reset on January 23, 2020 to 100 seconds to midnight.