Mushroom clouds and radioactive air may seem the stuff of movies and black and white public service announcements, but the nuclear weapons threat never really left us. Though the risks and challenges may be forgotten, there is still an active - albeit small - community of experts working to prevent the worse from happening. A collaborative among four foundations is designed to expand both the size and skill set that is brought to bear on this significant global challenge.

Remember the Soviet Union and the Cold War? With modern dangers like cyber-attacks and terrorist violence seemingly a daily occurrence, we forget—or maybe never knew—that the world used to live at the brink of daily extinction. Good thing we got past that, right?

Turns out, not so much. There are still more than 15,000 nuclear weapons on the planet today. They do not discriminate, they are sometimes prone to accidents, and their existence threatens literally everyone on the planet.

A potential solution is using a network building approach—sort of a “LinkedIn” for nuclear risks, acting as a matchmaker between the existing nuclear security community and other sectors and skillsets.

The good news is that talented people are working tirelessly to reduce these risks. The bad news: this community is small, generally aging, and not particularly innovative. The tools they use to affect change are conventional and traditional, and their achievements are modest and fleeting.

Enter “N Square,” a new kind of collaborative effort backed by four foundations and designed to attract new ideas, people, and approaches to eliminating this existential threat. Drawing from different sectors like media, technology, business, design, and art, it seeks to diversify the ways in which we think about nuclear threats, and the variety of possible approaches to eliminating them. It is meant to move beyond conventional thinking about how to change nuclear policy, and allow anyone and everyone to participate in the effort.

It uses a network-building approach—sort of a “LinkedIn” for nuclear risks. It acts as a matchmaker between the existing nuclear security community and other sectors and skillsets.

There are hundreds of people engaged through networks like TED, PopTech, the Norman Lear Center at USC, Singularity University, and others. These early network-building activities have generated compelling new ideas, tools, and partnerships among people and institutions that would not otherwise have found one another.

Approaches like this are not supposed to ultimately solve the nuclear threats we face. That is a job that must be taken on by more than one organization. It is a social mandate. Rather, these efforts are designed to help foster the kinds of interactions and multidisciplinary thinking and experimentation that is required to solve the many "wicked problems" that nuclear dangers pose.

But there is much more to be done. The philanthropic resources devoted to nuclear threats mirror the current expert community— dedicated, but small. Consequently, the sector should also be on the lookout for those that have resources to bring to bear. There are a number of ways to engage and invest, from direct work like public education to more “edgy” efforts like hackathons and challenge/prize techniques. Maybe you have an idea to add to the mix?