Name: Tyler Huang
Social Justice Group: 2022-2023, Nuclear Weapons/Nuclear Proliferation
Date of Fieldwork: February 10, 2023
Name of Organization and person (people) with whom you met and their title(s):Global Zero leader Derek Johnson
Type of Fieldwork: Interview
What I did and what I learned about my topic, activism, social justice work or civil and human rights work from this fieldwork?:
Derek Johnson is a managing partner of Global Zero which is an orginization that was formed in france which is focused on bringing world leaders together to talk about this issue. Derek was suprised on how we stumbled oppon this topic and was very curious on the reason why we picked this topic out of all of the other topics. He was happy to talk to us because one of their companies goals it to inform the youth about the nuclear crisis.
Overall Derek was verry happy to talk to us. We had a meeting planned with him the week before but he postponed it due to him being sick. We started off the interview by asking about his orginization Global Zero. He said that the orginization was focused on rallying global leaders together to discuss nuclear disarmenment. The goal for their company is to bring the nuclear weapon count to zero.
He told us that many people doubted him and said that it never will happen. They said that there will always be nuclear weapons and the nuclear threat will never go away. He said that his responce to those people was, “What a lot of people don’t realize is that there used to be (30 years ago) there was 70’000 nuclear weapons in the world. Now there’s 13,000. There’s been a loss of 80% of nuclear weapons in thirty years.”
Their company’s plan is to first get the United States and Russia to decrease their nuclear arsenals because they feel that the countries with 500 and less nuclear bombs wont lower their arsenals unless the US and Russia lowers their arsenals. They have a four stage rollout for their plan. During the feildwork I wondered how their orginization was funded and he said that they are mostly donation funded and from countreis without nuclear weapons.
