Although dismantling a nuclear bomb isn’t on many of our resumes, it’s on Smriti Keshari’s list of skills as she hopes to evoke conversation about making our world safer. In the video below, two hands disassemble a model of a Minuteman III missile.
The video was created by the Outrider Foundation, an educational nonprofit, that hopes to bring a less “apocalyptic message about nuclear weapons,” according to The Verge.
Tara Drozdenko, Outrider Foundation’s managing director of nuclear policy and nonproliferation, hopes this video will educate individuals on the decisions they can make pertaining to nuclear weapons.
“They are built by humans. We know how to take them apart. We can make decisions about them that make our world safer,” says Drozdenko. “This is a machine we’ve built, and our policies are just decisions that we’ve made. And we can decide to do something else if we want to.”
The video hones in on going through the disassemble process, such as removing and burning high explosives and safely getting rid of the ash. Anthropologist Martin Pfeiffer says nuclear disarmament can even use tools that are often common, every day tools to us. For example, in order to pry cables out of high explosives in a nuclear weapon without sparking or bending, individuals have used tongue depressors and cuticle pushers.
Drozdenko made contact with Smriti Keshari, film director and artist who co-created an art installation called The Bomb with author Eric Schlosser. Keshari says after reading Schlosser’s book, she felt helpless because she couldn’t do anything about a world with over 14,000 nuclear weapons.
In collaboration with Maxwell Sorensen, Keshari teamed up to create the video below.
The weapon is made from polystyrene plastic and wood. Keshari says a lot of thought and time went into the process of creating a video that demonstrated disassembling a nuclear bomb.
“When you’re able to break it down into steps, it also allows one to see the responsibility that’s happening at every step of it,” she says. “It’s important for us as citizens to engage on the issue, and not just throw up our hands and say, ‘This is too big of a problem.’”
Filed Under: Aerospace + defense, Product design
