Jennifer Knox ’14: Stanclift Fellow in International Policy

Unlike the Cornellians back on campus, I got President’s Day off. That Monday followed the long and grueling weekend that was the Reaching Zero summit, a well deserved break that I spent traveling. Madi’s flight back to Cedar Rapids departed from New York early on Monday morning, and I escorted her through the Big Apple before returning to DC. Finally returning to the office after such a long hiatus felt strange. The summit loomed so impassively in my thoughts of the future that I didn’t consider what would happen after – or how soon my internship would be over.

The European team spent a few days with us in DC this week before heading home. Their presence inspired several staff-wide meetings; it’s rare for everyone to be in the same place at once. I was extremely lucky to be able to sit in on the staff-wide Strategy Session, a four hour long, in-depth examination of Global Zero’s campaigns for the next year. I’m glad to have gotten some insight into the master plan, something that I am sure will be invaluable as I and other Cornell students try to get our own chapter running. The Strategy Session affirmed some general trends and developments I’ve observed during my time at Global Zero. The organization, which has fought hard to maintain credibility with a policy position most readily ascribed to hippies and dreamers, now has to loose the “suit and tie” character it earned and flaunt its wider support base. This means a shift in focus to galvanize its grassroots base and to attract political activists as successfully as it has attracted ‘policy wonks’ (like me). Reaching Zero marks a turning point in the history of the organization; it made the issue of nuclear disarmament broadly relatable to the students of a generation largely untouched by the nuclear specter. Now it’s time to further engage that generation and mobilize them when the opportunity presents itself.

Another meeting related to the effort to engage my generation: social media training. In the next few weeks, Global Zero is planning to ramp up the output on its social media outlets. Because I’ve been involved with scouting out relevant materials and articles to share with those interested in the movement, I’ve become familiar with the goals of the media outreach team. I’m happy to say that I will be continuing to hunt down shareable content for Global Zero even after I leave DC and recommend it to them through a tool called Delicious. I will also be filling blog post assignments for them when needed. This is fantastic for me because several of my ideas for posts were buried under work for Yale, and I’ll enjoy getting the chance to work on them. I’m thrilled to continue working with this team – it’s been so hard to leave!

After the frenzy of Yale, this last week has a distinctly peaceful atmosphere. There was still plenty to do, of course, as reimbursements from students and speakers began to pour in. Despite that flood, I managed to polish off the last few of my projects on the Yale backburner – finished up research and recommendations for 2012 outreach/fundraising opportunities, completed a datasheet of signatory birthdays, updated our database with some misplaced petition sheets, and such. The team took Friday and Monday off, giving me an impromptu block break and leaving me with one last day at Global Zero. Like that, my internship was over!

A lot of happy circumstances and a lot of remarkable people gave me these two months in DC with Global Zero. I already miss DC and the Global Zero team terribly, but I know that this is the beginning of a fantastic relationship! I can never fully express my gratitude for this experience.

Jennifer Knox ’14: Stanclift Fellow in International Policy

The week of the Reaching Zero Student Summit isn’t my last week at Global Zero, but nevertheless there’s a feeling of finality about it. This summit is the culmination, not just of the work that I’ve seen and been a part of during my time in DC, but of preparations that have been ongoing since early Fall of last year.

The Monday and Tuesday before we left for New Haven were characterized by the perpetually uneasy feeling that comes from packing for a trip. Our outreach efforts were a phenomenal success, with over 350 people registered before the event – this meant an equally phenomenal amount of material to pack along with the other hardware needed for an event like this. I personally handled the printing of several thousand articles and reports that would line folders on the registration tables, so the number 350 means something very real to me.

As we gathered and packed and sorted, one personal excitement further complicated those two days in the best possible way. Global Zero offered $150 and later $300 per Cornell student to attend the Reaching Zero summit; unfortunately, my efforts to work through the Berry Center to secure additional necessary funding didn’t work out due to time constraints (next time!). Derek made the call to fully sponsor one Cornell student so that the college would be represented. Happily I devoted a lot of those first days to helping Madi figure out last minute travel plans and navigate the circular paths from Mount Vernon to New Haven. She had a fantastic presence at the summit and made a lot of great connections. I can’t wait to get back on campus and join her in developing our own Global Zero chapter!

Wednesday we spent the day traveling and settling in. The European team came down and we met up with them for a staff dinner; it’s great to get to put faces to the voices I’ve heard on phone conferences for so many weeks. Our lodging, The Study Hotel at Yale, was fantastic: the perfect place to spend a few wise hours resting before jumping back into the fray of the War Room.

After hearing several dire warnings about how little sleep we’d all be getting during this event, I had a feeling that my experience in technical theatre would be valuable to me. Running tech, there’s a definite “do or die” atmosphere during the week leading up to the show. There is seemingly unlimited number of tasks to accomplish, and few people to accomplish them. Both that frantic environment, and the camaraderie that comes from everyone trying to make sure that no one is overburdened or underwhelmed, were as characteristic of this event as of any I’ve been a part of. Learning on the block plan also helped me cope with the intensity of that weekend, I think. More than anything those days resembled Week Four! Sleep is for after.

It turned out that my background in tech was even more meaningful than I expected! My task for the duration of the event was to run a/v and make sure that production went smoothly. I sat back in the booth and cycled between holding images, presentations, web pages, and videos as they were needed, while keeping the a/v team up to date on microphone needs during breaks. Considering that we didn’t have access to any of the equipment for set-up until an hour before the event started on Saturday morning, and that we were still getting updates on cues and content needs during the course of the day, I’m extremely thrilled at how smoothly the process went. Our a/v team commended Global Zero on a remarkably coordinated event, and we received several compliments for the professionalism of the presentations.

That I needed to be in the booth at all times during the day’s programming proved to be the biggest advantage to working on tech. I was able to spare several quiet moments to enjoy the fantastic speakers that Global Zero had gathered for the weekend. The summit is a daze of powerful moments and ideas, from listening to Hans Blix discuss the evolution of the Global Zero movement; to General Sheehan’s comments on the burden of history that inhibits the trust needed for removing NATO nukes from Europe; to Acting Under Secretary of State Rose Gottemoeller describing cooperative efforts between the US and Russia to limit nuclear arsenals; to Amb. Mousavian’s action plan for diplomatically assuring a nuclear weapons-free Iran; to Valerie Plame Wilson presenting her vision of a nuclear free world, achieved by the audience of 300 before her; to the ideas of Madi and my fellow Midwesterners on how to develop the movement back home.

This summit could not have been more successful or more overwhelming. I am so impressed with the people that I’ve been able to work with these past few months, and so proud to have been a part of their team; it was unbelievable to sit back and realize what their tireless efforts have accomplished.

Jennifer Knox ’14: Stanclift Fellow in International Policy

This week we hit the ground running after the Yale site visit. I spent a lot of time with the organization credit cards, finally finishing up with a lot of different vendors and providers: I fulfilled the contracts for our walkie-talkies, confirmed our reservations at the Newark hotel, purchased special binders and paper for the European staff and students (it is very difficult to find a5 binder and paper suppliers here in the states!), and completed the placement of ads in newspapers. In the next week Global Zero will be appearing in The Harvard Crimson, The Washington Square News, The Tufts Daily, The Hilltop (Howard University) and of course Yale’s school paper.

If this experience has taught me anything about event planning, it is that it’s always worth avoiding it and passing the buck on to someone else if possible. I cannot wait for the summit, though! The work will definitely pay off. In the meantime, there are a million more things added to the to-do list every day. I’m in charge of the Staples runs as the list of necessary supplies grows – Dupont has the smallest Staples I’ve ever seen. I found all of the supplies we needed eventually, though. My first trip to Staples coincided with my first reimbursement form! At least, the first reimbursement form I processed for myself and not for someone else.

Wednesdays are always eaten up by a series of conferences with different teams — first communication with the US Field Team, all located within the DC office, then a staff-wide conference call including our office, the NY and European teams, the Yale interns and a west coast outreach intern in Florida. We round it all off with a more focused call on the summit exclusively with the Yale interns and their team. Especially as we hammer details down on the summit, its good to have thorough communication with the other branches of Global Zero to make sure that everyone is on the same page. A lot of the items on the agenda have been discussed for such a long time that these calls can be tedious as well. The good news: we have a US campaign strategy (mostly)! More details will come out on that earlier next week, which is cutting it close — we’ll be announcing this campaign at the summit next weekend.

I attended the event Diplomatic Strategies for Preventing a Nuclear-Armed Iran on Thursday, once again hosted by the Arms Control Association. Speakers included the executive director of the ACA, Ambassador James Dobbins, and Peter Crail. The name that caught my attention, however, was Dr. Jim Walsh, who spoke a few months ago at Cornell about the realities of Iran’s nuclear program. As part of my policy research with Global Zero, I’ve become quite familiar with the different types of rhetoric characterizing the discussion on a potential nuclear Iran — the issue has exploded even during my time here at Global Zero as Republican presidential candidates fight to assert both the situation as an apocalyptic threat and themselves as the most capable defense against it. I’ve often wondered what Dr. Walsh thinks about these new developments, so many of which followed his own predictions about probable (and destructive) responses to Iran’s nuclear ambitions; at this panel, I satisfied that curiosity as he, and the other eminent figures discussing the topic, urged a diplomatic solution as the only viable option for an Iran without nuclear weapons. Sanctions, despite misconceptions common in popular discourse, can never be the equivalent of diplomacy. He asserted that sanctions may create the pressure that allows diplomacy to be meaningful, but the latter must eventually follow the former for any result to emerge. Another option bandied about quite brazenly is the possibility of a military strike — but there is no way to surgically remove Iran’s nuclear program. Intelligence communities have asserted with high confidence for years that Iran has the intellectual and technical capability to produce nuclear weapons; their enrichment programs are robust, well protected, and widely dispersed. The knowledge is there and it isn’t going away. Only a full-out invasion and occupation, the destruction of the regime and all scientific infrastructure, promises a military solution to the Iran question, and that solution is heavy both with ethical obscenity and world-wide political and economic consequences. The other thing that intelligence communities hold in high confidence, however, is that Iran has not yet made a decision to actively seek the bomb. We still have an opportunity to prove to the Iranian leadership that more prestige, influence, and security can come without nuclear weapons than with; Dr. Walsh’s concern is that a strike, far from sterilizing Iran, would compel it to choose to seek nuclear weapons actively. He pointed to the bombing of the Osirak facility in Iraq, the consequences of which were a full-throttle race for nuclear weapons.

Luckily all panelists believed that a diplomatic resolution was not only possible but also opportunistic. Dr. Walsh in particular endorsed a plan originally introduced by Iranian leadership, which offered to limit enrichment activities to 3-5% so long as fuel was provided for a reactor that produces medical isotopes in Tehran. More intimate cooperation with the IAEA is an additional important goal. In exchange, the United States needs to seek ways to reincorporate Iran into the international diplomatic and economic community. Ambassador Dobbins stressed the importance of more regular and informal communication between Iran and the United States. One summit a year, he says, isn’t going to cut it. The amount of scrutiny and attention an event like that receives makes it difficult for participants to maneuver — meaning that negotiations predictably devolve into theatrical check-lists of every wrong each state has committed against the other. With more regular communication, eventually press interest will peter out, allowing more earnest and flexible discourse to take root.

On Friday I attended another event, this one held at the Brookings Institution right next door from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where I work. These panels, titled New START at One Year: Implementation and Looking to the Future, celebrated the anniversary of the New START treaty by first explaining its accomplishments and then exploring the groundwork it has laid for future arms reduction negotiations. New Start has been extremely successful in strengthening communication and intelligence between the United States and Russia; it has established a system of active data exchange on deployed strategic weapons (huge databases handed over twice a year and thousands of notifications as that data changes) as well as short-notice inspections that either country can conduct at will to affirm the authenticity of that data. Unfortunately, New START only targets deployed strategic weapons. The thousands of strategic nuclear weapons in the arsenals of the U.S. and Russia, as well as any non-deployed strategic weapons, are not yet addressed. Panelists called for attention to be given to these stockpiles as negotiations move forward. However, the political environment in both countries as presidential elections approach make any definitive negotiations highly unlikely. In the next year, panelists recommended trust-building gestures and even more thorough intelligence exchanges that would create the right climate for arms reduction as soon as election rhetoric dies down.

A new perspective I didn’t expect to gain from these panels was Russia’s contributions and reservations concerning New START and arms reduction in general. The panel opened with praise, not only for the U.S. team of negotiators and policy makers, but also their equally hard working Russian counterparts. Nevertheless, the United States and Russia approach the question of arms reductions with extremely divergent priorities. While the United States brings to the table a strong interest in nuclear weapons reduction, Russia is more worried about U.S. conventional capacities. This makes negotiations a difficult balancing act and helps to explain recent tension over the missile defense system plans in Europe.

Director of the Brookings Arms Control Initiative Steven Pifer, who served as moderator for the two panels, and Acting Under Secretary of State Rose Gottemoeller, featured in the first panel, will both be speaking at the Reaching Zero student summit next weekend! It was fantastic to see such eminent speakers before the summit.

Jennifer Knox ’14: Stanclift Fellow in International Policy

This week there were several time constraints that I needed to work around. I’ve been researching the birthdays of our signatories, and it’s important to make sure that the February ones make it up onto the calendar quickly. Birthdays are a great excuse for some quiet communication; I’ve noticed that in our outreach both to eminent world leaders and to our grassroots support, an important goal is to make sure that their interest and obligation to Global Zero is an accessible part of their thinking. A little note in the mail on a birthday, innocuous enough, reminds the receiver that they have an allegiance to this organization and a commitment to its goals. Maybe Cornell’s development office should start sending out birthday cards (although Cornell’s alumni base is considerably larger than Global Zero’s signatories, requiring far more expensive postage).

I had an interesting if distant brush with a famous signatory: I booked a chauffeur and car for Valerie Plame Wilson, a CIA operative who was in the news quite a bit in the last few years; both a book and a film have been produced about her experiences in the CIA. Hers weren’t the only travel plans that we needed to secure. Global Zero is managing or directly arranging the travel of almost every attendee of their student summit, down to the last student. I’ve been pulled into several of these meticulous arrangements. After my extensive communication with the European team to finalize room lists and book space at the Newark hotel, today I got directions from above to investigate the possibility of tripling up the occupancy of the rooms and booking less. It makes sense — we are already going over the budget for the student summit, so saving where we can is a great plan. Despite this I feel pretty guilty trying to scrape together new room lists with the Europeans after so much back-and-forth just to establish the now unusable room lists. I’m also engaged in an endless amount of communication with different vendors and businesses, trying to secure their services for this summit. Today I drummed up a contract with a charter bus company to ship the international students from Newark to New Haven and back again, although we may not be able to book it because of complications and miscommunications that led to some international students purchasing train tickets.

Derek made me responsible for organizing the printing of our ads in different school newspapers. I did a lot of research on rates, which surprisingly involved a lot of math (business tip, college newspapers: don’t make a potential client do math) and even contacted our preferred schools and arranged for a few discounted prices. The numbers that came out of it are still pretty high, though, so we may not end up purchasing as many ads as we hoped. At least the editors were a lot more cooperative for this venture than for the press release I sent out.

A few of Global Zero’s elite members attended the Munich Security Summit this week — we finally received the printed versions of the report that I found examples of formatting for. It details Global Zero’s plan in the next few years, which involves a bilateral arms reduction (1,000 total of strategic and tactical nukes for Russia and the US) and the removal of all nuclear weapons from European combat bases. These policies would break the ground for the first multilateral arms reduction treaty, one of the more distant goals in Global Zero’s action plan. It’s exciting to get to read this report before it’s released to the world leaders at the Munich Security Conference!

This week marks the beginning of February, a milestone that everyone is paying attention to because our student summit is looming ever closer. It is scarily close. I can feel the stress and I’ve only been working on this for the last month; the rest of the team has felt this slow pressure since September. I drafted the official email blast that will be going out to every student registered for the summit. My goal was not necessarily to provide them with new information so much as to get them thinking about the questions that will inevitably come up as they and we try to coordinate this mass migration to New Haven (Yale is a beautiful place but also thoroughly in the middle of nowhere — It’s almost as bad as trying to host an event of this size at Cornell). It’s important to encourage an active thought process for this summit in order to discourage the “flake rate.”

On Thursday I left with a few team members for an impromptu site visit at Yale. The cost in time made us hesitate, especially when workloads are really beginning to swell in relation to the summit, but there is an undeniably valuable benefit to speaking face to face and seeing venues in person. In the last week or two it has become clear that Global Zero is facing a fantastic but difficult challenge: the response to this summit has been overwhelmingly positive, and we now have to plan around far more students than anyone had anticipated. Our short trip to New Haven yielded a lot of meaningful discussion about the options before us, although there is no one path without its own share of obstacles.

Jennifer Knox ’14: Stanclift Fellow in International Policy

I have a lot of ongoing projects which require a lot of resilience to manage, because every day there is some little something that needs to be done to move forward and some little something that can’t be done yet, something that needs to wait until tomorrow. One such task that’s slowly trudging toward completion is the duty of booking hotel rooms for the international students who will need to stay an extra night in Newark. There are a bunch of different people, here in DC and on the international team as well, that I need to coordinate with to ascertain the number of students, the best location, the number of rooms, whether or not to pay for breakfast, how often the airport shuttle runs, if the cost is effective, whether or not I can use the company credit card to hold the rooms, etc. This is further complicated by the fact that the agent at the hotel with whom I have been communicating is not in the office very often. Convoluted tasks like this are especially stressful because of the consequences of failure — if something goes wrong, 21 people will be out a place to sleep in a foreign country.

Happily I’ve almost finished this project and the other logistics problems that I inherited since one of our key Ops team members is out on vacation. We’re working on a lot of different projects for Yale now — printing posters and flyers, ordering booklets and folders and pad folios, figuring out where branding will go and the sizes that we need, mulling over t-shirt designs and other merchandizing decisions, and endlessly on. We’re getting close enough to the conference that we’re all starting to feel the stress — and the heads of our office are almost constantly being pulled out for various discussions and meetings.

So far we have 80 non-international students registered for the conference at Yale, which is excitingly close to our goal of 125, and an impressive and prestigious list of speakers. Although I don’t especially enjoy the time that I spend working with Cornell’s Phonathon program, my instinct that Phonathon experience would be valuable when working with non-profits has proven to be spot on. Even a lot of the jargon from Phonathon is similar to the campaign language that’s used here. Target contacts are called prospects, and different participation goals from the grassroots element of the movement are referred to as asks. My tasks this week sent me into the depths of our contact databases. The information we seek out is very similar to the priorities at Phonathon. At the end of the day, it’s just about securing a different kind of ‘yes,’ then building a relationship and coming back for more.

My blog post has finally gone live on the official Global Zero site! I also updated the website for the first time with new news coverage, an article that referenced analysis by one of Global Zero’s cofounders. This afternoon I prepared and editing an op-ed for the Cornellian about the student summit at Yale. No matter what I work in, I’m getting more and more entrenched in media outreach. It’s extremely interested to participate in this perpetual process of digesting complex policy developments and preparing them for a non-specialist audience.

This week I attended event called Panel Discussions on the Global Partnership Against the Spread of Weapons and Materials of Mass Destruction, which featured two overall discussion topics: past and ongoing contributions of the Global Partnership to international security and WMD nonproliferation and threat reduction, and the increased importance of coordination with and among international organizations in promoting WMD nonproliferation and threat reduction. This wasn’t the most compelling event that I’ve attended here in DC, but ironically it was by far the longest. The most noteworthy speaker was Ambassador Bonnie Jenkins, and there were also representatives from WHO, IAEA, and even Interpol. It’s possible that their discussion went too far over my head, but there didn’t seem to be a lot of especially specific information conveyed through the course of this event. I did find it interesting to learn about GP efforts to develop an outreach program for the scientific community, particularly those members who are stewards of our world’s nuclear materials. Because it’s a new approach to global nuclear security problems, there isn’t a lot of precedent and it’s difficult to find funding, but GP says that the effort is worthwhile because scientists have a unique international language and priorities that can bridge otherwise daunting cultural barriers. GP is also trying to transition from a bilateral to a multilateral approach, decentralizing and putting more effort into regional concerns, but apparently it is difficult to make states talk to each other about issues that they easily disclose with a bilateral overseer.

Jennifer Knox ’14: Stanclift Fellow in International Policy

The building that Global Zero’s DC office is located in, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, is a beautiful and historical structure just a block from Dupont Circle. The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace just celebrated its centennial in 2010; it’s the oldest international affairs think tank in the country. Special events and panels regularly fill the conference rooms on the first floor, and this week on Friday I got to attend one of them as part of my research on current nuclear policy objectives and developments. The panel, titled The Future of the U.S. Nuclear Arsenal: Issues and Policy Options, featured speakers featured speakers Morton Halperin, who worked on nuclear policy and arms control in the Johnson, Nixon, and Clinton administration; Hans Kristensen, director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists; Amy F. Woolf, a specialist in nuclear weapons policy at the Congressional Research Service; and Daryl G. Kimball, the executive director of the Arms Control Association, which was hosting the event.

Topics of discussion took for granted the importance of deterrence as a function of the nuclear arsenal, but overwhelmingly the consensus was that deterrence goals could be met with a significantly reduced stockpile of nuclear weapons. Woolf provided keen insight into the problems of reducing spending on nuclear arms while all three branches of the Triad were facing serious aging; plans to replace these aging machinations, she said, must be stretched and delayed for any short-term impact on budget. Cutting actual submarines, bombers, and ICBMs from spending plans would help in the long-term, but most spending in the next three years will be focused on research and development for these new delivery systems, not their actual construction. The most interesting discussion to me contemplated “Cold War thinking,” something that has been denounced since the end of the Cold War in rhetoric but which has retained its fierce grip on U.S. policy. Halperin explained that the U.S. nuclear arsenal is structured around the perceived necessities of deterring a surprise Russian nuclear attack — that the arsenal is obligated to be capable of waging a certain level of destruction on a certain number of targets (never cities, he sarcastically mentioned, just targets that happened to be within them). He proposed that we need to completely re-evaluate the likelihood of a surprise nuclear attack from Russia — not treat it like a miniature Soviet Union — and the capacity of destruction we need to demonstrate to stave off random nuclear aggressions. One excellent question someone asked at the end of the presentations: why should our response to a nuclear attack be nuclear in nature? Couldn’t conventional force achieve the same deterrence through a similar promise of destruction? Halperin responded that we had come a long way in our thinking, that first we considered nuclear responses to conventional aggression, then nuclear responses only to nuclear aggression, and finally conventional responses even to nuclear aggression. He called for further debate on the topic.

In the coming week I’ll be preparing a blog entry about the discussion generated by this panel. My last blog entry – after thorough revision and editing – should go live on Global Zero’s blog soon. In the meantime, I continue looking through news feeds, analyzing the latest developments in proliferation and recommending articles for the media outreach team.

An important member of the Operations team who has been directing a lot of the logistics surrounding the Yale summit left for Taiwan to celebrate the Chinese New Year. In her absence, I’ve taken on some of her workload, including responsibilities about arranging travel for some of the speakers attending the conference. Someone told me a terrifying story about almost losing a four-star general at a recent summit in London; I hope I don’t have any stories like that at the end of this experience! One stressful duty I inherited was the job of making sure trains tickets safely reached Hans Blix, Former Swedish Minister of Foreign Affairs and Former Head of the UN Monitoring, Verification, and Inspection Committee.

Jennifer Knox ’14: Stanclift Fellow in International Policy

My first week has been devoted to a lot of different projects and meetings; it’s great to get a feel for what everyone is working on as I become oriented in my place on Global Zero’s team. As the new year begins and the 2012 student summit at Yale draws near, it’s an exciting time to be getting involved!

A lot of the week involved a staff-wide conference and smaller brainstorming sessions to discuss Global Zero’s U.S. campaign strategy for 2012. This year creates difficult challenges when considering what groups such a campaign could target; Congress is held in general contempt for being ineffectual, making it almost impossible to engage anyone in a campaign centered around it, while the upcoming presidential elections create more problems than benefits. It’s important to create a plan flexible enough to have impact no matter who is inaugurated in November. We’re looking at ways to encourage the growth of the grassroots movement, to continually engage supporters and communities, and to put ourselves in a good position to act come this fall.

A highlight of the week: I was able to attend a panel titled The Best Defense: Protecting America in an Age of Austerity. The event featured speakers Lawrence Korb, the Assistant Secretary of Defense during the Reagan administration (also a confirmed speaker at the Reaching Zero summit), Spencer Ackerman, a senior writer at wired.com, and Heather Hurlburt, former Special Assistant to the President and State Department Policy Planning Staff Member during the Clinton administration. They discussed proposed budget cuts impacting defense spending and what areas those budget cuts should target, endorsing a leaner and more efficient military better suited to respond to contemporary global conditions of conflict. The nuclear arsenal was only mentioned briefly, but without controversy — always complete assurance in the necessity of cutting the nuclear arsenal. I’m developing a blog post covering the event with Global Zero’s media outreach team; it’s been a long process to turn such dense and dry information into something that would be interesting and enjoyable to read on a blog, but I’m pleased with the end result.

I’ve also been focused a lot on logistics for the Reaching Zero summit, investigating those easy-to-overlook details which all come together to make an event like this possible — housing options for attending students, transportation for staff, inventories and shipping arrangements for merchandise, rentals for walkie-talkies, etc. I especially enjoyed contacting potential speakers for the event to follow-up on their invitations, which involved a phone call to the Embassy of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. After two seasons of calling Phonathon for Cornell, it’s a huge relief to have conversation over the phone in which I am allowed to accept the first ‘no thanks’ and leave it at that.