You’re a child of the nuclear age. Were you inspired to start a career in nuclear arms control because of your PhD in nuclear physics – or did your interest start sooner?
My father, a mathematician, was working in nuclear missile design at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. I was five, and I remember my mother crying all the time and my father being preoccupied. I asked my father what was happening, and he told me there might be a war, with these big bombs, but don’t worry because it’s so awful that they won’t do it. He was worried sick, so I didn’t fully believe him. That was my introduction to nuclear weapons and nuclear deterrence. He told me about Santa Claus the following year.
My father, who was the first person in his family to stay on in school after 14, then went into energy and ended up in charge of European affairs for British Gas. He became involved with Chatham House, on energy and climate change and co-chairing a committee with Jonathan Stern. My mother had trained as a nurse but should have been a teacher – she had extraordinary communication skills and was quite the linguist as a speaker of Irish.
Patricia Lewis, who has lead Chatham House’s International Security Programme since 2012, says there needs to be a greater diversity of voices in the security sector.
What made you to move from academia into arms control?
In the early 1980s I took a job at the University of Auckland as a physics lecturer and helped set up the New Zealand branch of Scientists Against Nuclear Arms.
As scientists we supported activists with information and analysis. It was a really interesting time. I had adopted my first child from Kolkata – I had spent a year there working voluntarily – so I was a young mother thinking a lot about the future, at a dangerous period of the Cold War. There was palpable fear, but also films, books and marches. The problem was that the activists were so successful in getting nuclear-armed vessels banned from New Zealand waters that we felt that we could do anything.
When I came back to Britain, I decided to leave academic physics and become the first employee of the Verification Technology Information Centre (Vertic), just as Mikhail Gorbachev came to power – it was an exciting time with so much potential.
Do you think the popular sense of threat from nuclear weapons has diminished?
It has and it hasn’t. President Putin and Kim Jong Un have certainly ramped up the threat but the way in which people think about the threats has changed – many populations are less aware of the devastating, long-lasting impacts of nuclear weapons – and that’s unfortunate because the consequences are even more dire than we had understood.
What we are seeing is how international law and arms control are connected. In a virtuous circle, commitments to international law are verified and signatories to arms control treaties feel the political ramifications. In a vicious circle, which is what is happening now, treaties are being either reneged upon or withdrawn from. Are we going to be able to prevent the use of nuclear weapons before we get to a point where good faith is restored?
There is also a lack of belief in what is called extended deterrence. In the Pacific, the US has alliance agreements with Japan and South Korea to defend them, including with nuclear weapons. But Japan and South Korea have for a long time wondered if the United States would put itself at risk to defend Tokyo and Seoul.
You spent over a decade at the UN Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR) and then a spell in California at the James Martin Centre for Nonproliferation Studies before taking up your post in 2012 at Chatham House. What has given you most satisfaction over the past 12 years?
I loved my time at UNIDIR and the research and teaching in Monterey. I know that UN is not perfect – how dare we ask that it should be? – but it does enormously useful work. The most important aspect of the UN is that it’s the one place where everyone can sit next to each other. Even if governments are at odds, personal relationships really matter – they can stand the test of time, trust can be maintained. Someone might be uncomfortable with what their own government is doing, so you have to have a discussion without putting them in jeopardy. One way is the Chatham House rule, of course.
Here at Chatham House, it has been satisfying to be able to give younger people opportunities and to see them run with them. The paper we published on nuclear risks, Too Close for Comfort: Cases of Near Nuclear Use and Options for Policy still gives me great satisfaction. We also did really groundbreaking work on the vulnerabilities of weapons systems, nuclear infrastructure and space satellites to cyberattacks. We were one of the first organizations to look at this and show that, as long as you’ve got connectivity, you have got vulnerability.
How diverse is the security policy sector?
It’s a white boys’ club, which is frustrating. Because it’s important to have that diversity of voices and backgrounds when it comes to formulating policy – otherwise significant understanding and solutions get missed. There are some very good men out there who believe they are supporters of women in the field. But talk to the women, you get quite a different view. And you see it in meetings, with funders, how easy it is to push women aside – and on social media where different views get shut down – often through the use of sexist and racist tropes.
What area of security policy do you think deserves much more attention?
Conflict prevention. People say it’s a bit late for that, but if we frame our understanding as always being between conflicts, then we can frame our thinking about how to stave off the next conflict. With the advent of UN and regional peacekeeping, peace building and conflict resolution since 1945, the world has built up a huge body of knowledge but we haven’t yet worked out what might work, when, and how and why.
Some people have an erroneous belief that you can’t prove that you’ve prevented a conflict. The medical sector used to say something similar, but now huge investments in prevention techniques for disease are starting to pay off. We need to get to that place with conflict. It will take time and serious investment but will be transformative.
