BACKGROUND TO TALKWORKS

TalkWorks was set up as an independent initiative in January 2009 by Anne Piper and Rosie Houldsworth, former chair and deputy director respectively of the Oxford Research Group, in the wake of warnings by very senior statesmen and international experts about an imminent global ‘nuclear tipping point’ and their call for a concerted programme of global nuclear disarmament, led by the nuclear nations themselves.

Our purpose was to film and disseminate via the internet the voices of leading politicians, military chiefs and independent experts, many of them former proponents of nuclear deterrence, who had concluded that deterrence, or M.A.D., Mutually Assured Destruction, was no longer fail-safe with nuclear proliferation out of control and only complete nuclear disarmament would assure security from further proliferation and an inevitable nuclear catastrophe  The four highly respected senior US statesmen who had written a series of op-eds in the Wall Street Journal were calling for a step-by-step plan of action on the part of the nuclear powers to halt proliferation and reduce their own reliance on nuclear weapons, leading to the ultimate goal of their compete elimination (or ‘Global Zero’). They urged the US government to take the lead, and on 5 April 2009, US President Barack Obama gave his landmark speech in Prague issuing the same warnings and committing the United States under his administration to work with other nuclear nations to “reassert the vision of a world free of nuclear weapons” and take all necessary steps towards achieving that goal. The speech marked a turning point in global nuclear affairs that galvanised the disarmament community and political leaders across the world, in what came to be known as the ‘nuclear disarmament spring’. However these pronouncements and events passed by with barely a mention in the media and unnoticed by the vast majority of citizens.

The ‘nuclear disarmament spring’ was the catalyst for TalkWorks. With a start-up grant from the Faith Raven Trust we piloted the project for 6 months and had produced the first series of 16 films by the autumn of 2010. With additional financial support from small charitable trusts and individual donors, we teamed up with independent filmmaker Andy Russell of Different Films and set about interviewing the most senior spokespeople for the new nuclear disarmament agenda. Over three years TalkWorks produced 70 short web-based films made from interviews with individuals from across a broad range of backgrounds and expertise, including former military chiefs, international diplomats, senior political figures, top scientists, international security experts, spiritual leaders and experienced peace builders.  In April 2010 we produced a 20-minute feature documentary entitled ‘Signs for Hope’ incorporating clips from TalkWorks interviews interwoven with the voices of young people, intelligent and thoughtful university students filmed in Oxford Parks about what they know and feel about nuclear weapons, and their hopes for the future (available on DVD price £10 + P&P). 

In 2010, we were invited to film members of the newly formed UK Parliamentary Top Level Group for Multilateral Nuclear Disarmament & Non-proliferation (TLG), a cross-party forum convened by former UK defence secretary Lord (Des) Browne to promote the multilateral nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation agenda. TalkWorks was given a letter of endorsement by Lord Browne, and in May 2011 we were invited to film George Shultz, William Perry and Sam Nunn of the Nuclear Security Project when they came to London with Henry Kissinger under the auspices of the US Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI) for a screening in parliament of their film Nuclear Tipping Point. TalkWorks produced full-length film coverage of the event for YouTube, making this high-level discussion public to anyone with access to broadband; and we produced a short trailer entitled Three Friends for use as a promotional video on the NTI website and for TalkWorks itself.

By December 2011, the ‘signs for hope’ of 2010 were fading fast under the weight of multiple political and global pressures. We invited former Swedish foreign minister, weapons inspector and seasoned international diplomat, Dr Hans Blix, to give his personal assessment of the achievements and failures of the disarmament agenda. His rather pessimistic view of the prospects for disarmament in the immediate future is conveyed in the series of four short films entitled ‘Blix on Disarmament’ made from that interview. We also filmed nonagenarian UK nuclear historian and author on nuclear issues, Dr Lorna Arnold OBE, for three short TalkWorks Specials in which she reflects on the past, present and future of the nuclear age, from her unique perspective of having worked inside and writing about the nuclear industry for over 50 years, from its earliest beginnings in 1944.

While keeping our central focus on nuclear weapons and disarmament, TalkWorks expanded its scope in 2013 to explore the bigger picture of global crisis the world finds itself in the first decades of the 21st century, in which the nuclear threat looms large. We launched our new series under the title ‘Global Perspectives 2013’ with interviews with eminent British cosmologist and former president of the Royal Society, Lord Rees, author of ‘Our Final Century?’ (2003) and ‘From Here to Infinity’ (2011), and with world renowned global security and international terrorism expert, Professor Paul Rogers, Professor of Peace studies at Bradford University and Sustainable Security Consultant to the Oxford Research Grou(ORG), talking about the ideas outlined in his briefing ‘Chances for Peace in the Second Decade—What is going wrong and what we must do’, published by ORG in December 2012.

We have begun work on developing of a full-length feature documentary film which will draw on TalkWorks’ rich archive of interviews, to be made by Different Films in association with TalkWorks, with the provisional working title of  ‘Infinite Possibilities’. We shall soon be ready to seek development funds with a view to getting started in 2014.

We are deeply grateful to the charitable trusts and individual donors listed below who supported us to get TalkWorks started and make our films. We are a very small team of 3 people operating on a tiny budget with minimal overheads, but we urgently need further financial support if we are to continue to make, improve and disseminate our films.

If you support TalkWorks’ aims and methods and like what we do, and are able to make a donation however small (by sponsoring an individual interview and film, for example, which costs £700); or if you can disseminate and promote the films, especially by embedding them in your own website and sharing them via your Facebook, Twitter and other social and professional networking sites, please get in touch with me.

Thank you.

Rosie Houldsworth.

OXFORD, UK

APRIL 2014