The Nonlinear Library EA - Case study: Traits of contributors to a significant policy success by Tom Green
Apr 1, 2024
01:17:50
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Case study: Traits of contributors to a significant policy success, published by Tom Green on April 1, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum.
Summary
As the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the fate of its weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs presented a new type of catastrophic risk: what would happen to all the nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons and materials, and the scientists who worked on them? The nuclear weapons were distributed across what were about to become four separate countries (Belarus, Kazakhstan, Russia, and Ukraine).
Plus, the thousands of experts in those weapons, many of whom went unpaid for months at a time as the Soviet economy collapsed, could be easily tempted to sell information to, or even work directly for, states who were then seeking to build out WMD programs such as Iran and North Korea.
But, by the end of the decade, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine had agreed to dismantle or return all their nuclear weapons to Russia[1] and joined the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) as a non-nuclear weapon state.[2] And across all four countries, thousands of biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons had been destroyed or deactivated by 2013.[3] All this was achieved via the Cooperative Threat Reduction Program (CTR), about which a lot has already been documented and
written.
I'll aim to summarize its key events here, but the main purpose of this article is to look at some of the key people who have worked on CTR, particularly on the policy side: what are some of the individuals' qualities, behaviors, and approaches that helped to make CTR a success?
I've identified three high-level groups of factors; the lines between these groups are blurry and there's inevitable overlap between them, but overall it seemed useful to cluster the factors around bigger themes.
The first group of factors is interpersonal skills: this includes building trust and relationships; bringing people together across disciplines and countries; mentoring and getting the most out of others; and communicating effectively.
The second group is strategy and leadership: this includes establishing a vision and energizing others to work on it; big-picture, long-run thinking; an entrepreneurial approach to foundation/NGO work; and modeling good epistemics and norms.
The third group is personal qualities and values: this includes mission orientation; boldness and risk-taking; and a willingness to put oneself forward and embrace responsibility, even in daunting or uncertain circumstances.
Methodology and research notes
Most of my work on this post was desk research; I also conducted a few interviews with experts on CTR which were mostly background / off the record, and mostly not with people who'd worked directly on CTR. This piece is far from exhaustive; its goal is just to infer some of the qualities and behaviors that might have made some CTR contributors successful, not to provide a comprehensive history or analysis of CTR, nor to give a comprehensive list of all of the most important contributors to CTR.
Sources are all linked or in the footnotes; some that I drew on the most were:
David E. Hoffman's The Dead Hand.
Carnegie's oral history interviews with David Hamburg: all videos are available via this link, and I've also linked to the full transcript in the footnotes.
Benjamin Soskis's 2013 Nunn-Lugar report for Givewell. I can't find the Givewell page where this is linked now, but this is the direct download URL.
Sarah Kutchesfahani's 2010 PhD thesis, "Politics & The Bomb: Exploring the Role of Epistemic Communities in Nuclear Non-Proliferation Outcomes."
A lot of easily-available CTR content is mostly technical or implementation-focused (e.g. the NSA's Nunn-Lugar resources) rather than people-focused. This makes sense; I only note this because peop...
Summary
As the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the fate of its weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs presented a new type of catastrophic risk: what would happen to all the nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons and materials, and the scientists who worked on them? The nuclear weapons were distributed across what were about to become four separate countries (Belarus, Kazakhstan, Russia, and Ukraine).
Plus, the thousands of experts in those weapons, many of whom went unpaid for months at a time as the Soviet economy collapsed, could be easily tempted to sell information to, or even work directly for, states who were then seeking to build out WMD programs such as Iran and North Korea.
But, by the end of the decade, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine had agreed to dismantle or return all their nuclear weapons to Russia[1] and joined the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) as a non-nuclear weapon state.[2] And across all four countries, thousands of biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons had been destroyed or deactivated by 2013.[3] All this was achieved via the Cooperative Threat Reduction Program (CTR), about which a lot has already been documented and
written.
I'll aim to summarize its key events here, but the main purpose of this article is to look at some of the key people who have worked on CTR, particularly on the policy side: what are some of the individuals' qualities, behaviors, and approaches that helped to make CTR a success?
I've identified three high-level groups of factors; the lines between these groups are blurry and there's inevitable overlap between them, but overall it seemed useful to cluster the factors around bigger themes.
The first group of factors is interpersonal skills: this includes building trust and relationships; bringing people together across disciplines and countries; mentoring and getting the most out of others; and communicating effectively.
The second group is strategy and leadership: this includes establishing a vision and energizing others to work on it; big-picture, long-run thinking; an entrepreneurial approach to foundation/NGO work; and modeling good epistemics and norms.
The third group is personal qualities and values: this includes mission orientation; boldness and risk-taking; and a willingness to put oneself forward and embrace responsibility, even in daunting or uncertain circumstances.
Methodology and research notes
Most of my work on this post was desk research; I also conducted a few interviews with experts on CTR which were mostly background / off the record, and mostly not with people who'd worked directly on CTR. This piece is far from exhaustive; its goal is just to infer some of the qualities and behaviors that might have made some CTR contributors successful, not to provide a comprehensive history or analysis of CTR, nor to give a comprehensive list of all of the most important contributors to CTR.
Sources are all linked or in the footnotes; some that I drew on the most were:
David E. Hoffman's The Dead Hand.
Carnegie's oral history interviews with David Hamburg: all videos are available via this link, and I've also linked to the full transcript in the footnotes.
Benjamin Soskis's 2013 Nunn-Lugar report for Givewell. I can't find the Givewell page where this is linked now, but this is the direct download URL.
Sarah Kutchesfahani's 2010 PhD thesis, "Politics & The Bomb: Exploring the Role of Epistemic Communities in Nuclear Non-Proliferation Outcomes."
A lot of easily-available CTR content is mostly technical or implementation-focused (e.g. the NSA's Nunn-Lugar resources) rather than people-focused. This makes sense; I only note this because peop...