Week 5:
Global Zero

January 23, 2014

I have spent a lot of the past week continuing to develop the concept of my editorial blog post. I noted in a previous post about how my major in History has prepared me to think about issues and events in terms of arguable thesis, and that continues to help my approach. One new area for me though is transforming those thesis into something newsworthy. A history essay is never confronted with the question “so who cares”, but that is an important part of journalism and blogging. There needs to be some inherent timeliness to the story, or else you need to get creative and come up with some connection to current events.

I had been struggling with a way to present my opinions about nuclear weapons in a story that had a timely-news hook but I think I’ve come up with a couple of options now that will have that covered. The basic issue I wanted to explore was nuclear weapon’s (lack of) military utility. I am exploring 2 current events twists for this story:

1) Comparing my analysis to an analogous world war 1 defense program (2014 is the hundred year anniversary of WWI),

2) The pentagon has been in the news recently freaking out about having to cut service personnel to 420,000; I could say “if they’re looking at ways to save money what about the nuclear program…”

In the end I’ll probably use some combination of the two instead of choosing just one of them.

Researching and writing this blog post has been the most exciting thing I’ve done at GZ. I personally am really interested in national security and international relations so it has been a pleasure getting to delve into the nuts and bolts of the nuclear weapons issue.