I have been searching for ways to get people to engage with the risks to humanity created by nuclear weapons.
The whole issue seems to collide with the affect problem: the commonplace intuitive belief that talking about good or bad things causes them to happen, or simply the instinct to move away from and avoid unpleasant issues.
Pleasant or not, nuclear weapon issues need to be considered. With the US-led international security order smashed by Donald Trump’s re-election and extreme actions, the prospect of regional arms races in the Middle East and Southeast Asia has never been greater and the resulting risks have never been so consequential.
To try to get over the ‘unwilling to talk about it’ barrier, I have been writing an interactive roleplaying simulation on nuclear weapon proliferation called Rivals. I am working toward a full prototype and play-testing, and to that end I will be attending a series of RPG design workshops at next month’s Breakout Con conference in Toronto.
I am very much hoping to connect with people who are interested in both the issue of nuclear weapon proliferation and the potential of this simulation as a teaching tool.
That is brilliant Milan. It could become a most useful and sought after teaching tool.
Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro in AI Studio did an interesting job of simulating playthroughs of Rivals in the new global context following the Israeli and US strikes on Iran. It misuses some game mechanics from the rules, but definitely captures the kind of creativity in strategy and diplomacy the game is meant to allow.
It also has very smart ideas for countering the likelihood the game will develop into a race toward the bomb by all parties, though implementing something like this would require having secret parts of the rules or perhaps a ‘player spoilers’ section in the Ref guide…
The Islamic Republic of Iran serves as a perfect illustration. Over the last two decades, Israel and the United States have tried to persuade the world to stop treating Iran as a normal country and to instead treat it like the international system’s leading danger. The result has been constant denunciations, crushing sanctions, threats of military action, and, most recently, military operations against its territory—carried out during diplomatic negotiations between Tehran and Washington. Iran, in response, has been forced to devote more resources and attention to defense. It also increased uranium enrichment in defiance, to show that it would not be pressured into submission. The external securitization of Iran has fed into a parallel dynamic at home, as the state adopted a stricter approach in dealing with domestic social challenges, responding to these challenges with tighter restrictions.
The result is a securitization cycle: a vicious spiral in which Iran and its adversaries feel compelled to adopt more hostile policies in response to each other’s behavior. This phenomenon is somewhat like the security dilemma, in which one government’s decision to bolster its capabilities prompts others to do the same. But with the security dilemma, each side is reacting to material increases in the other’s capacity. This cycle begins with rhetoric. The target country is portrayed as a threat, and then is treated as a threat. And in response, it turns to activities—such as bolstering its missile capabilities or increasing enrichment—that can be used to corroborate the initial allegation. The cycle, in other words, produces a self-fulfilling prophecy. The securitized country gradually distances itself from independent agency and becomes trapped in a series of reactive behaviors.
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/iran/how-america-and-iran-can-break-nuclear-deadlock