After his brother’s death, Patrick Bringley took a job at the grandest place he could find.
After Patrick Bringley lost his older brother in 2008, he decided to take the most straightforward job he could think of in the most beautiful place he knew. He left his job at the New Yorker’s events department and spent the next 10 years as a security guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Bringley’s new memoir, All the Beauty in the World, tells the story of his time at the Met. It’s full of satisfyingly inside-baseball facts: the secret routines of the guards, the basement galleries where the Met’s earliest collections linger, the backstories of stolen art. It’s also a story of art appreciation. Bringley makes a strong case that nothing teaches you to understand a work of art better than standing in a room with it for eight hours at a time, with little to occupy you but the art and your own responses to it.
Perhaps most importantly, though, All the Beauty in the World is a story about grief and about beauty, and about how inextricably the two are linked.
When I lost my father last spring, I was surprised to find that grief made me crave beauty. Movies had taught me that when faced with real grief, beautiful things become pale and petty and pointless, but that wasn’t how it was for me. It was May then, and the week after my father died, my mother and I went to an arboretum to breathe air that wasn’t from a hospital. The lilacs and viburnums were in bloom; the roses were beginning to bud; the trees were lush and green. We were still in shock, I think, and it was a profound solace to stand in the middle of a garden, looking at nothing but lovely things. “I think beauty is going to be an important part of all this,” my mother said.
I wanted to understand more about why beauty was so important to grief. So at the beginning of February, I met Bringley at the family entrance of the Met on 81st Street to walk the galleries. We couldn’t come close to covering all 2.2 million square feet of the massive building, but we would talk about art, beauty, and the secrets of the Met, and try to figure out beauty and grief together.
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Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis via Getty Images
“These floors are not so good,” Bringley says, stamping one foot on the mosaic tiles of the Greek and Roman wing. Floors feature heavily in All the Beauty in the World: When you’re working eight- to 12-hour shifts standing upright, the material matters. Any kind of stone floor will leave you feeling it in your legs and back; soft, forgiving wood is better.
There’s still plenty to look at, though, he adds. “What’s brilliant about what a guard gets to do in a place like this is you just have eight hours or 12 hours to not be busy, not be advancing some project, but just to have your head up and observe the life swirling around this place.”
When he worked as a guard, some days he would spend an afternoon studying the labels and trying to learn about ancient Rome, he says. “But then other times you want to just admire beauty, kind of irrespective of its context. So, you know, just look at this and marvel.” He gestures to an elegant statue of Aphrodite, arms amputated at the shoulder, head turned in profile.
“You know, the ancients, especially the Greeks, thought that the most beautiful thing in the world was themselves, was us,” he says. “They conceived of the gods as having our form. So maybe you’re looking at a statue like this, and then you’re looking at other people in the galleries like, ‘Wow, how mysterious is it that we have all these different beautiful people wandering around with their own worlds trapped inside their mind.’ You get to think about that kind of thing.”
You also, he admits, have to look out for people damaging the art or trying to steal it. Nothing’s been stolen from the Met within his lifetime, but the 1970s were a rough era for art museums.
Around the corner from the Aphrodite, tucked into a side gallery, is a marble head of a herm from the 5th century BCE. Herms were pillars placed at the sides of roadways, dedicated to Hermes, god of roads and doorways and thieves. The Greeks would carve his head into the top of the pillar and his erect phallus into the center. This one is just the head, though, and it was stolen in 1979, Bringley says.
That was the year the Met was exhibiting its King Tut show, which drew the biggest crowds the museum ever saw. In the midst of the confusion, Bringley says, a guard turned around and found himself facing an empty plinth. There was immediate outcry and scandal: an ancient statue stolen from the Metropolitan Museum of Art!
Just a few days later, on Valentine’s Day, an anonymous tipster told police to look for the herm in a locker at Grand Central Station, and the statue was recovered. “The crazy part,” says Bringley, “is that there used to be a heart-shaped carving above his left eye. And when they recovered it, it had a matching freshly carved heart above his right eye.”
(I look in vain for the hearts, but they have long since been restored away.)
“And remember, this was Valentine’s Day,” says Bringley. “So one theory of the case is that somebody was wandering through. He saw the heart. He’s like, ‘I don’t have a gift for my girl.’ He swipes the thing as sort of a grand gesture. He creates the other heart. She opens the box, says, ‘What in the hell are you doing?’ and they call the tip in themselves.”
When you’re in love, sometimes nothing can say it like art can.
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Sepia Times/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
In All the Beauty in the World, Bringley writes about going to the Philadelphia Museum of Art with his mother shortly after his brother’s death. They each gravitated toward a single painting. Bringley found himself before a medieval Adoration of the Christ, depicting Mary tender and peaceful with her newborn son. His mother, meanwhile, went to an early Renaissance Lamentation, in which Mary cradles her son’s tormented corpse. They each stood before their paintings, the way I had stood in the lovely May garden with my mother, and they wept.
Why is it, I ask Bringley now, that we find ourselves to be so in need of beauty when we grieve?
He leads me around another corner to a Greek grave marker from the third century BCE. In the center, the dead man appeared in relief carving, sitting on a handsome chair and clasping hands with his father. His mother and brother stood watchfully in the background.
“It’s a leave-taking with the dead,” Bringley says. “I think anyone who’s sat by the bedside of a sick person, which most of us have — there’s this sort of heart brimming up at the same time as your heart is breaking. There’s something very profound going on, but it’s also very simple. You’re with your family. You’re with loved ones. There’s nothing on your mind except this event, and that makes it beautiful. Art captures the silent poetry of it.”
He leads me out of the Greek and Roman galleries and up the great staircase to the Old Masters, where Ludovico Carracci’s Lamentation of Christ sprawls 5 feet long across the wall. Through a trick of perspective, Christ’s dead body, bleeding and mangled and very nearly life-sized, seems to be held unsteadily by the frame; any second now, it might tumble out of the painting and onto the floor of the gallery.
“When this was painted, it would have seemed astonishingly naturalistic,” Bringley says. “Clearly that young man is a real young man, maybe an assistant or something in his workshop. You have this sense that Carracci’s wanting you to bear witness to something.”
The religious art of the West — which was for many centuries the most celebrated and well-funded art of the West — is full of these images of Christ’s tortured body, as much as it is full of images of Christ as a newborn. It’s all adoration and lamentation.
“It makes good sense, right?” says Bringley. “The humanities all have to do with how we only live a short span on this earth. What I felt privileged to be able to do as a guard is to bear witness to these scenes in the way that I think they would have intended us to.”
My father died very quickly, in a way. He’d had his disease for a long time, but it didn’t seem to affect his day-to-day life all that much; the treatment often seemed more inconvenient to him than the disease itself. Then for about a week before he died he was listless and tired, and then on the last day of his life, my mother called me and my sister and told us we should come to the hospital and see him.
That endless, endless day at the hospital, I frequently thought, “This is the worst day of my life.” I also thought, “This is the most beautiful day of my life.” It was terrible; it was appalling; I could hardly stand to be there; but I was there, and so were my mother and my sister, and all three of us were there because we loved him, and because we could not let him die without us. That bare fact was, in a horrible way, beautiful.
“When we adore, we apprehend beauty,” Bringley writes in All the Beauty in the World. “When we lament, we see the wisdom of the ancient adage ‘Life is suffering.’ A great painting can look like a slab of sheer bedrock, a piece of reality too stark and direct and poignant for words.”
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Emmanuel Dunand/AFP via Getty Images
Outside the Old Masters gallery, at the head of the staircase down into the Great Hall, Bringley shows me a patch of stone wall about six feet off the ground that’s notably darker than its surroundings. That’s a guard smudge, he says: the result of over a century of guards standing at the head of the stairs, leaning their heads against the wall, for day after day of eight-hour shifts.
“This post right here is such a wonderful post,” he says, gazing out over the crowds in the Great Hall. “As a guard, everyone else is rushing about. They have some office they need to be in. You’re almost like an aristocrat of old who has nothing to do. It’s like you’re in a Jane Austen novel where people just take turns about the garden like that’s their entire existence.”
Bringley once asked an older co-worker how he ended up becoming a guard at the Met. “The only thing I’ve ever wanted to be is an independently wealthy patron of the arts,” the man said. “This comes closest.”
“The Met laid off a lot of guards during Covid, didn’t they?” I ask.
“The whole experience was tough,” Bringley acknowledges.
Down we go again, down the staircase and into the medieval wing, where everything is covered in faded gilding. I think, as I always do in this gallery, that it would be interesting to live among the objects. Then, as I always do, I think of the children’s book classic From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, about two kids who run away from home to live at the Met. I read it in the fourth grade, and it became at once my introduction to the idea of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the beginning of a lifelong dream of running away to live at a museum.
I ask Bringley if he knows the book. “It sort of seems like you lived the Frankweiler dream,” I say. “You ran away to the museum and never came back.”
“I’m reading that to my kids!” he says. “They’re probably a little too young for it. But there’s some truth to that, for sure. One of the reasons that that book appeals to people is this idea of escaping into some place that’s just beautiful and full of fascinating things, and escaping the world outside. There was an element of that to my story for sure. I think over the course of my whole journey, I also began to realize the virtues of also being out in the world that’s full of complications and mess. I hope that I carry things from this world out into that world.”
He stops us in front of a gold and crystal reliquary, shining and ornate, with fanciful filigree work done along the gold. Embedded in the crystal is what appears to be a single human tooth. A molar, maybe.
“So this is Mary Magdalene’s tooth in there,” Bringley says. “If you’re predisposed to believe it. It is a real tooth. A dentist confirmed that in the ’70s.”
“Oh,” I say. “Cool.”
The reliquary itself is from 15th-century Florence, Bringley explains, but the crystal it houses was a North African perfume bottle 500 years before that.
“I also like to point this out, because, you know, this is a reliquary,” he says. “Pilgrims would have come to visit such a thing. The point of coming to visit a reliquary is to have an experience with it, to be in its presence and feel its power and feel its sanctity. I don’t know if you get that from a tooth, but that’s what the Met still is. It’s still where people come and want to face something and experience something that by dint of its beauty has something to it, a sort of vibration in it that makes us feel something that maybe we can’t quite put into words. I think people feel like they’re sitting in a great mosque or a great temple or a great church.”
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Frederick Kelly/New York Historical Society/Getty Images
Back up the stairs and into Asian art, where Bringley walks me over to a 13th-century Japanese Buddha, 3 feet tall and leafed in gold.
“I just find this so beautiful,” he says. “I can stand in front of that and feel a glimmering of enlightenment from it, you know? Just a little taste. But then also, don’t kid yourself. You begin to dig a little deeper and learn about this stuff, and you realize that this is not the Buddha that we know, Siddhartha. This is different. His name is Amida, he’s the Buddha of Infinite Light.”
Spending time in the Met, Bringley says, makes him realize how many different branches of knowledge there are and that it would take a lifetime to learn even one of them fully. “It imbues you with incredible humility when you realize that none of us can be an expert on almost anything. We only have one life to live, and we follow one little path. But at the same time, you can still borrow from it. You can get a taste of it.”
A Mongolian visitor, Bringley says, once approached him to ask for help as he walked through the museum. With limited English, the visitor had trouble making himself clear, but he gradually put across the idea that he wanted to know what exactly he should visit in order to “piece it all together.”
“It became clear to me in that moment that this guy had his one visit here,” Bringley says, “and his ambition was not to say, ‘Hey, I saw some cool things at the Met.’ He wanted to walk away with his theory of the world.”
That’s one of the most productive ways, Bringley thinks, of approaching a museum this big and overwhelming: Use it to try to figure out how you think about the world.
“All of this art is mostly concerned with things that we still have in our lives,” he says. “We still live in a universe where all those stars are twinkling overhead and God is strange and wondrous. A lot of this art has great ambitions to think through that mystery and splendor. We’ve only got one life to live. We might as well be thinking about those big things, too.”
My father took me to art museums throughout my childhood. He was a hedonist when it came to art; for him, looking at a painting was a physical pleasure. In one of the poems he left behind, he compares the taste of the first cigarette after a long time away from smoking to “seeing a Cézanne with new glasses.” They are both so good that “the pleasure is startling.”
When I was a child, this attitude bewildered me. I wanted to know what a painting meant, but that wasn’t something he was interested in telling me. He did not come to museums to think. He came to museums to feel the art.
Now I think that art makes us think by making us feel, by acting on our emotions in a way that nothing else quite can. My father loved that about art. He was a man devoted to aesthetic pleasure, and that’s how he chose to live his one life.
As we start to make our way out of the museum, Bringley mentions that he recently paid a recreational visit himself, to see the Met’s temporary Tudor exhibit. It was bittersweet, he said.
“Back in the day, if I did that, I would have been like, ‘Oh well, this is my first time seeing this show. I’ll be posted here 12 additional times. Today I can just get the lay of the land and find a couple of favorites. Then I’ll dig in.’” But those days are gone: “Now I’m a normal person.”
How we turned 20,000 Soviet nukes into zero-carbon energy — and how we can do the same with some of our own.
Just a decade ago, one in 10 American lightbulbs was powered by dismantled Russian nuclear weapons.
That was made possible by the Megatons to Megawatts program, an agreement negotiated after the collapse of the Soviet Union to convert uranium from Russia’s nuclear weapons stockpile into fuel for US nuclear power plants. The unconventional policy was first proposed by MIT physicist Thomas Neff in a 1991 New York Times op-ed. By the time Megatons to Megawatts ran its full course from 1993 to 2013, it had eliminated about 20,000 nuclear warheads and stood out as a point of shared pride in the often jaded arms control and disarmament field. “Nearly every commercial nuclear reactor in the United States received nuclear fuel under the program,” then-US Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz remarked when the final uranium shipment left St. Petersburg for Baltimore 10 years ago. It was, he said, “one of the most successful nuclear nonproliferation partnerships ever undertaken.”
Megatons to Megawatts was diplomatically deft, reducing the risk of nuclear catastrophe while providing zero-carbon energy. It took advantage of a unique political moment with the USSR’s dissolution in 1991, which opened a door through which arms control agreements moved with remarkable speed.
For me, a designer working on system transitions in complex problem spaces, the beauty was in the transmutation of bombs to lightbulbs, military to civilian, swords to plowshares. It was political alchemy. When it comes to intractable issues like nuclear risk and climate change, the status quo is relentlessly sustained by political, economic, cultural, social, and technological forces. It’s a challenge to make meaningful progress in any of these arenas, much less implement an intervention that multitasks so elegantly.
Yet despite widespread acclaim, the program was never extended, expanded, or replicated elsewhere. “The initial agreement was so quick and successful that I would have hoped we built more upon it,” Douglas Shaw, senior adviser at the Nuclear Threat Initiative and professor of international affairs at George Washington University, told me. Upon learning about the program, my immediate reaction matched his conclusion: there should be more where this came from.
Especially now. The Doomsday Clock, a symbolic measure of our proximity to global man-made catastrophe, currently reads 90 seconds to midnight — the closest it’s ever been since the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists started counting in 1947. International norms against nuclear weapons use are eroding, thanks in part to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The only remaining arms control treaty between the US and Russia is on shaky ground, and experts fear an unfettered arms race if it goes unrenewed. “Geopolitical crises with grave nuclear undertones are spreading fast, from the Middle East, to the Korean peninsula, to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine,” said UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres from Hiroshima last summer.
Megatons to Megawatts can’t simply be copy-pasted into a geopolitical context so different from 1991. Dismantling another country’s nuclear weapons for our own energy needs is unlikely to happen without a destabilizing shift in international power on the order of the Soviet Union’s collapse. But we can apply the program’s lessons domestically, thereby reducing the risk of nuclear catastrophe and gaining low-carbon energy — right here in the United States.
From a 2023 perspective, the model has even more obvious benefits. The emissions-saving aspect of nuclear power wasn’t an explicit selling point back when Megatons to Megawatts was negotiated, but it’s important now in a world that’s scrambling to meet climate goals and contend with ongoing energy crises. The possibility of a ready-made uranium supply is also hugely appealing, given that mining fresh uranium ore comes with considerable environmental and human rights costs, particularly for Indigenous communities.
National security incentives for the US to maintain its nuclear stockpile consistently outweigh its incentives to disarm, but we could tip the scale toward disarmament by linking it to climate mitigation and energy security. Although Megatons to Megawatts is a relic of the past, it had lasting impacts on international energy supply: the program helped Russia build a monopoly on nuclear fuel exports, which ironically may become off-limits to the US due to the war in Ukraine.
As we face the challenge of rapidly building a cleaner and independent energy supply, we have to expand a conception of national security that still focuses narrowly on military supremacy. We can turn our own nuclear bombs into energy, and simultaneously address nuclear threat and climate change as twinned existential risks.
Megatons to Megawatts, explained
Formally known as the US-Russia Highly Enriched Uranium Purchase Agreement, the Megatons to Megawatts deal kickstarted the conversion of 500 metric tons of highly enriched uranium (HEU), the kind used in bombs, into low-enriched uranium (LEU), the kind that fuels nuclear power plants. That uranium generated 10 percent of US electricity over the course of 20 years.
At the time the program was created, the civilian energy was seen as just a nice bonus. Its main purpose was to address America’s national security concerns by whittling down the enormous Russian arsenal and securing nuclear material that experts feared might end up in the hands of terrorists or other rogue actors after the Soviet Union’s dissolution. For Russia, the exchange offered billions of dollars in revenue for its collapsed economy, integration into international institutions, and development of its nuclear industry into the global player it is today. Symbolically, it demonstrated that the Cold War as we knew it was over, and that the two countries possessing over 90 percent of the global nuclear stockpile were acting on their legal commitment to disarmament and the peaceful use of nuclear technology.
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Dmitry Lovetsky/AP
Obviously, the US-Russia relationship isn’t what it was in the early 1990s. Though undoubtedly successful at preventing proliferation, cooperation with former Soviet states had not been born out of goodwill and charity but out of fear and urgency. By 2012, Russia decided not to renew the Cooperative Threat Reduction program — a plan designed to assist the dismantling and securing of nuclear materials in former Soviet states — their Ministry of Foreign Affairs calling it “not consistent with our ideas about what forms and on what basis further cooperation should be built.” In 2014, Russia faced international condemnation for its annexation of Crimea, resulting in sanctions and suspension from the G8. Given today’s ongoing war in Ukraine and Putin’s threats of nuclear retaliation against the West, it’s safe to say that Moscow won’t be signing onto another Megatons for Megawatts deal any time soon.
But implementing a similar policy in today’s America doesn’t need to be contingent on a geopolitical Goldilocks moment with Russia or any of the seven other nuclear states. In fact, the current moment provides its own rationale for focusing on the stockpile at home.
The war in Ukraine, now nearly a year old, triggered an energy crisis that has sent prices way up as Europe scrambles for alternatives to the Russian gas that constituted much of its imported supply. High prices are taking a toll on consumers around the world, but a potentially positive consequence is the incentive for countries to invest in renewable and low-carbon fuel alternatives.
In the US, the crisis has throttled our ability to build new nuclear power plants because of Russia’s stranglehold on the necessary fuel. Next-generation nuclear power plants, known as small modular reactors (SMRs), are considered an important transitional technology in the race to meet net-zero emissions goals due to their smaller physical footprints, flexible modular designs, and built-in safeguards. But they require high-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU) fuel, which is available almost exclusively from Russia at a commercial scale.
Overcoming our dependence on Russian HALEU will require investing in alternative enrichment facilities, and in the meantime, establishing a domestic weapons-to-energy pipeline of the sort that Megatons to Megawatts modeled. The US government already did convert a scant seven of its more than 585 metric tons of bomb-grade HEU into nuclear fuel between September 2013 and March 2016, according to the most recently declassified documents. We have the capability and infrastructure to do more, but it would require that we consider uranium to be more valuable in our nuclear reactors than in our bloated nuclear arsenal.
Why it’s so hard to let go of our nukes
Though America has reduced its arsenal dramatically since the Cold War, it clings to a disproportionately costly military-industrial complex and holds the second-highest number of warheads in the world after Russia. Even taking the view that our nuclear arsenal is a “necessary evil” in a world where multiple countries still possess weapons of mass destruction, the US could realistically maintain its deterrence with a far smaller number of warheads.
Of the estimated 5,244 nuclear warheads in the US arsenal, 1,536 are retired and scheduled for dismantlement. But dismantled weapons don’t necessarily result in surplus HEU for dilution into LEU — called downblending — and civilian use. The disassembled components of retired nuclear bombs, as the New York Times recently reported, are often destined for “a maze of bunkers and warehouses … a kind of used-parts superstore from which new weapons can — and do — emerge.” This kind of weapons-to-weapons Frankensteining is a common, expensive practice in stockpile modernization programs — and only consistent with the concept of “retirement” in the way that a disgraced CEO resigns publicly with sacrificial fanfare and quietly starts a doubly profitable venture firm.
The technical conversion of bomb-grade HEU to nuclear fuel is pretty easy, and the HEU is already there, burning a hole in our pocket. Up until 10 years ago, the US was doing this at scale with Russian uranium. But right now, national security forces consider it too high-stakes to reroute HEU for non-military purposes — particularly in light of the war in Ukraine and American fears about the possibility of Russia using a tactical nuclear weapon. It’s bad optics for the US to reduce its nuclear arsenal while Russia threatens to use theirs.
“Those speculative scenarios keep US nuclear requirements high,” Shaw says. “How many weapons, what kinds do we need? What hedge for the future do we need? And if we end up with surplus material, by all means, let’s recover the commercial value from it.”
As an actionable step toward disarmament, this is sensible and satisfying. We should do this right now. But if the ideal future is a world free from the constant threat of nuclear disaster, there’s a philosophical limit to the risk reduction approach because designating something as “surplus” assumes that the remainder is absolutely necessary. We should question whether it is necessary. The ideal size of our nuclear stockpile isn’t determined by some objective mathematical calculation, but rather by the human judgment of a select few. That includes factors like, Shaw told me, imagined worst-case estimates of our adversaries’ military forces.
Enforcing more risk reduction measures, like taking missiles off hair-trigger alert or establishing clear lines of communication in the event of an attack, is crucial for rendering the current nuclear weapons system less likely to cause disaster. But such measures also end up reinforcing the status quo precisely because they make the system marginally safer to keep around and therefore easier to justify. While they are a step toward disarmament, they may paradoxically keep the concept of elimination at arm’s length. It’s a bit like focusing on climate adaptation (like building flood-resilient infrastructure and engineering drought-resistant crops) while neglecting climate mitigation (like transitioning away from fossil fuels and preventing deforestation).
That’s why it’s crucial that we challenge the parameters by which we think about nuclear risk in the first place. Our government tends toward hoarding and upgrading its weapons because at the core of all its game-theory complexity and purposefully obscure statecraft, its model says: we will be less secure if we have fewer nuclear weapons. This conclusion runs counter to all our best human instincts, common sense, and popular opinion — and it’s why groups like the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons are advocating for abolition rather than accepting that we’re stuck with nukes that could incinerate humanity as we know it. “I see real value in policies that are risk reduction aims,” Emma Claire Foley, a researcher for the nuclear abolition movement Global Zero, told me. “But if you’re talking to almost anybody about this, you get a real intuitive, ‘Obviously, they should not exist.’”
The case for confronting nuclear risk and climate risk simultaneously
Public concern about climate change and energy policy is increasing in the meantime, but that largely hasn’t been reflected in national security policy. “The idea that climate is a national security issue has begun to expand a little bit, but the policy mechanisms and the bureaucracy to support that are still way behind,” Laicie Heeley, founder of the foreign policy magazine Inkstick, told me.
The government shores up what it defines as a national priority, whether that be nukes or corn or airlines. If climate change took up more space in that club, we’d see the wisdom in freeing up even a fraction of the cost for nuclear forces, which is currently projected to total $634 billion over the period from 2021 to 2030. The recently passed National Defense Authorization Act increased the Pentagon’s 2023 budget to $858 billion and boosted spending on nuclear weapons.
Megatons to Megawatts offers a rare glimpse at the immediate material trade-off that happens upon giving up weapons to gain energy. Both literally and conceptually, it committed to building a new world out of the old. It’s proof of concept for the daunting systemic transition we must now make: moving away from a security solely dictated by military preparedness against perceived foreign threat, and toward a security driven by action against ongoing planetary change.
For my work in systems design, I’m trained to conjure creative approaches to sprawling, complex problems. My colleagues cross-pollinate among disciplines from linguistics to geophysics to community organizing. Both in and outside the arms control field, there are universities and municipalities and Twitter users churning out imaginative interventions for a vast range of issues. But you need the right political moment for an idea to mature into implementation. “I had the right idea at the right time,” as Neff told me in an email exchange about the Megatons to Megawatts program.
Even so, I’d challenge the notion that we need some perfect opportunity to act. That complacent disposition suits the status quo and fails to account for what we already control — factors like moral clarity or stubborn determination. For Neff, good timing still required him to remain the go-between, orchestrating the unlikely common denominators that made the Megatons to Megawatts deal appealing to all its signatories. “I compare it to having a child,” he said. “Easy to produce but hard to raise … It took roughly 18 years of my life.”
Perhaps I shouldn’t use militaristic metaphors to promote disarmament, but this one is too pertinent: the effort to reduce risk of nuclear disaster and the effort to mitigate climate change are two battles in the same existential war. As author Jonathan Schell put it in his book The Seventh Decade: The New Shape of Nuclear Danger, “Both are the fruit of swollen human power … Both threaten life on a planetary scale. Both require a fully global response. Anyone concerned by the one should be concerned with the other. It would be a shame to save the Earth from slowly warming only to burn it up in an instant in a nuclear war.”
Among disarmament advocates, there can be a sense that climate and nuclear nonproliferation agendas are vying for congressional goodwill and philanthropic dollars. There’s also a legitimate concern about “fear fatigue” — that the public doesn’t have bandwidth to be anxious about so many existential threats at once. With a weapons-to-energy policy, we wouldn’t need to play these zero-sum games. By making disarmament part and parcel of climate mitigation, we can build the political will to do both.
Irina Wang is a designer and writer at the intersection of existential risk and structural injustice. She practices the creative work of cross-sector translation, the strategic work of systems transition, and the ethical work of forging allyship.
What Turkey and Syria’s deadly earthquakes reveal about wealth.
In the early hours of Monday, February 6, residents living in southern Turkey and northern Syria were woken by violent shaking, collapsing buildings, and sweeping blackouts. The earthquake buried residents in rubble and was followed by powerful aftershocks. By the following Monday, the death toll had passed 36,000 people. “It was like the apocalypse,” Abdul Salam al-Mahmoud, a resident of Atareb, Syria, told Reuters.
The country is no stranger to quakes, having lost 17,000 people to a 7.4-magnitude tremor in 1999. But while last week’s earthquake was a 7.8-magnitude quake, and had an unusually strong 7.5-magnitude aftershock, the reason this earthquake is so deadly has less to do with its power, and more to do with the preexisting circumstances of the affected communities and the lack of preparation for disaster.
Freezing temperatures, road blockages, and social unrest are complicating humanitarian aid and recovery efforts, despite having more than 100,000 rescue personnel in Turkey and Syria. The earthquake damaged the only official humanitarian aid route in the northern parts of Syria, delaying delivery of aid to Syria. And in Turkey, a primary port in the southern part of the country suspended operations the day after the earthquake due to a quake-related fire. These obstructions lead to a bottleneck effect, where aid is unable to reach the people it was intended to help, said Margaret Traub, the head of global initiatives for International Medical Corps, which is currently assisting Syria and Turkey’s disaster response. (The US has temporarily lifted its sanctions on Syria for 180 days to usher in aid.)
In Turkey and Syria, the high concentration of old, inflexible, concrete buildings, the lack of construction oversight, the Syrian civil war, and an ongoing cholera outbreak have left the region vulnerable to devastation. “You already had areas where people were displaced and living in temporary shelters,” said Traub. “In many ways, they’re already really compromised going into the disaster, and now they’re doubly displaced, and don’t have their support mechanisms.”
This is what happens when you end up on the wrong side of the disaster divide, which explains how unequal losses experienced by certain communities and countries following a natural disaster are chiefly due to the discrepancy of wealth and resources, limiting the ability to invest in the very things — strong buildings, weather prediction, rapid humanitarian response — that would prevent deaths. There’s a reason that 90 percent of disaster deaths between 1996 and 2015 occurred in low and middle-income nations, the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction found. It’s not that rich countries are somehow exempt from extreme weather and geological events. It’s that the lack of wealth, and everything it can buy, is what makes a quake or a hurricane or a tornado disastrous, more than the sheer strength of a storm or how high a quake scores on the Richter scale.
Earthquakes are devastating — more so than other natural disasters — for those living on the other side of the divide. Wealthier nations that are able to upgrade older buildings, build new quake-resistant infrastructure, and invest in training and resources for their emergency response teams are likely to fare better during earthquakes than less wealthy countries. And communities — like the Syrian refugees hit by last week’s quake — who were suffering prior to natural disasters lack the means of resilience, making it even more difficult for them to rebuild, let alone rebuild in a way that prepares them for the next disaster.
“When we talk about disaster response, we’re often thinking about what happens right after a disaster,” said Rebecca Rice, a professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, who researches emergency communications. “But it’s not just how you respond right away. It’s how you build a stronger community, where people have the social resources and the capital they need.”
How the disaster divide plays out
Earthquakes are one of the deadliest types of natural disasters, accounting for the majority of natural disaster-caused deaths in the last two decades, and they are often followed by aftershocks, landslides, tsunamis, and fires.
Millions of low-intensity quakes occur every year, but every one or two years around the world, a major quake with a magnitude of 8 or higher transpires. But while magnitude measures intensity, it isn’t necessarily an indication of damage. In January 2010 one of the deadliest earthquakes in the 21st century shook Haiti, killed an estimated 220,000, injured 300,000, and left 1.5 million homeless. The quake was at a 7 magnitude. Only a month later, in February 2010, Chile was hit by an earthquake of even greater intensity, an 8.8 magnitude. Yet, Chile saw a much smaller death toll at 500 deaths and had relatively little structural damage.
This is because Chile learned from its history, and as a relatively high-income country, had the means to address problems with its infrastructure and disaster response. Before a disaster occurs, stakeholders — nonprofits, local and national governments, and community members — should be brought together to make an emergency response plan, said Rice. In 1960, the Valdivia earthquake in Chile killed thousands, left 2 million people homeless, and caused $550 million in damages at the time — in today’s dollars, that’s $5.4 billion. This earthquake led to Chile developing stricter building codes and creating a coordinated national response for such emergencies, just as Rice suggests.
In contrast, Haiti, the poorest country in Latin America and the Caribbean, suffers from the ongoing ramifications of colonialism and government corruption. Many of the resulting deaths from Haiti’s 2010 earthquake were attributed to the catastrophic collapse of buildings which did not use reinforced concrete and were not designed for the lateral motion caused by earthquakes.
This disparity in resources means nations like Chile can and do implement life-saving measures and materials while countries on the other side of the divide cannot. “We have the means to survive even large earthquakes,” said Luigi Di Sarno, program director of sustainable civil and structural engineering at the University of Liverpool. “The matter is cost, affordability, and the willingness to implement things.”
Bridging the gap
The disaster divide is not caused by a country’s lack of engineers or policies, but by a lack of resources and motivation to implement those policies, said Di Sarno. Unfortunately, the quake in Turkey is evidence of how this lack of implementation can lead to catastrophe.
In 2011, Turkey was shaken by a 7.2-magnitude quake that killed approximately 600 people. At the time, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan blamed poor construction for the loss of life. In the dozen years since that disaster, Turkey, like most countries, updated its seismic regulations and sought to improve its construction practices, but it faced logistical issues in doing so, Di Sarno said.
Putting seismic-conscious regulations into practice is time-consuming, costly, and is often hindered by political corruption, Di Sarno added. “It is a trade-off between efficiency, availability, and also a willingness to accept the given cost of implementing them,” he said.
Despite Turkey’s attempt at improved codes, the February 6 earthquake caused more than 6,000 buildings to collapse (About 4,000 buildings were seriously damaged or collapsed in the 2011 quake). Many experts believe the inadequate enforcement of building regulations played a significant role in the loss of life last week. “Building codes in Turkey are very advanced,” Di Sarno said. “It’s the implementation, because of the economy and other things, the quality control is not fully ensured.”
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Aziz Karimov/Getty Images
Earthquake preparedness measures, particularly up-to-code buildings, are not a one-off cost, Di Sarno said. Somewhere like Syria, which doesn’t have the resources to build earthquake-resilient infrastructure once, won’t be able to maintain that same infrastructure to the extent required. “We tend to believe that structures can stay forever, but even structures, like a car, are designed for a given time window,” he said. This window, in most countries for an ordinary, residential building is 50 years, he added.
“Buildings are intended to survive even the abnormal actions — strong winds, earthquakes, floods — but this cannot happen forever,” Di Sarno said. “And what we are experiencing in a number of situations, including in Turkey, is that these buildings are aging. There is corrosion taking place, there is a degradation of the material.”
Wealth isn’t a perfect shield, and sometimes quakes will be strong enough to circumvent even the best building codes, said Di Sarno. Even rich countries can suffer from high levels of economic loss and death when a quake is strong enough to cause a tsunami and disrupt critical facilities, such as in the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake that damaged Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. That disaster killed more than 18,000 people.
The disaster divide can also be seen in the post-disaster response. Unlike Turkey, an upper-middle-income country, Syria is low-income and only recently started receiving international aid. Syria was already facing life-threatening conditions prior to the quake, with the UN Security Council stating in January that humanitarian needs in Syria reached their “highest levels” since the war began in 2011. Now, the dire circumstances of Syrians living in affected cities, like Aleppo, are only aggravated. The country will have to rebuild communities that were already falling apart, but doing so will be time-consuming and costly.
“As for the case of Haiti, and now in Syria, we should also consider the presence of conflicts that increase the vulnerability of communities,” Di Sarno said. “Wealth, political instability, and even harsh weather conditions affect the response to natural disasters. Resilience of local communities is severely affected by such additional threats.”
While well-intentioned, donations made in the immediate aftermath of disasters, such as this earthquake in Turkey and Syria, often fail to actually reach the people they are trying to help and can lead to wasted supplies. The real challenge when responding to disaster is finding support once immediate rescue efforts are completed, said Art delaCruz, the CEO of Team Rubicon, an international NGO that specializes in disaster response.
“This response will go on for a long time, from a health perspective, and from an infrastructure perspective,” said delaCruz. “The real danger here is the attention that this earthquake is getting now, or a tornado or a hurricane gets in the beginning, it fades very quickly. But the reality for the people that are on the ground continues.”