Two paramount human-made existential threats: Nuclear weapons and our climate
Nov 13, 2024
“I don’t see a pandemic finishing us off, and climate change itself would (to quote Keating) ‘do us slowly’. The one sure path to extinction is nuclear war.” – Professor Peter Doherty AC, Nobel Laureate, communication to the author, 9 Sep 2024.
Two days after Donald Trump’s election last week, the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service reported that this year will be the warmest on record and the first year more than 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, likely more than 1.55°C above. Yet exactly when global leadership on climate action is needed most, the world’s second-largest emitter has a climate-denying, corrupt, criminal president-elect with no regard for facts, committed to leaving the Paris Agreement and ramping up fossil fuel extraction and use.
The stakes could hardly be higher at this year’s climate COP in Baku, Azerbaijan, starting this week. Most of us now understand how crucial to human and planetary health a stable and hospitable climate is, and that securing this is the defining challenge of our age. Yet too few of us make the connection that the most acute, immediate danger to our lives and climate still comes from nuclear weapons.
The two paramount human-made existential threats we confront today – nuclear weapons and climate change – exacerbate each other and need to be addressed together, with utmost urgency. One harms us and our biosphere every day, the other could deplete it irrevocably and end human civilisation and many species in less than a day.
Last week the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons Australia launched a new briefing paper examining what nuclear weapons and climate change have to do with each other. The paper addresses the connections between climate, nuclear weapons, nuclear power and the stuff that puts the ‘nuclear’ in nuclear weapons. What effect would nuclear war have on the climate? Does climate change increase the risk of nuclear war? How does nuclear power generation—sometimes touted as a climate-friendly energy source—relate to nuclear risks? Could the massive amounts of radioactivity inside nuclear reactors and waste storages cause radioactive contamination akin to nuclear weapons? Could nuclear facilities themselves be turned into weapons?
Robust scientific evidence shows that the tens of millions of tons of smoke from burning cities ignited by even a nuclear war in one global region, involving 2% of the global nuclear arsenal, would suddenly plummet temperatures worldwide to ice age levels for several years, decimate agriculture, disrupt ocean food chains and condemn over two billion people to starve to death.
Burning cities from a nuclear war involving 4400 Russia and the US weapons, possessing close to 90% of the world’s nuclear arsenal, would put 150 million tons of smoke into the atmosphere. This would plummet average surface temperatures 10°C colder than present, and 20-35°C colder in large areas of Eurasia and North America, a severe abrupt ice age that would result in the large majority of the world’s 8 billion people starving to death, along with the starvation and extinction of many other species.
Nuclear weapons and climate are deeply interconnected. The hospitable and stable climate required for human and biosphere health needs protecting from both rampant global heating and nuclear war.
A climate-stressed world is an even more dangerous place for nuclear weapons. Over the last decade, the number of armed conflicts and their casualties have steadily grown, exacerbated by food and water insecurity, worsening poverty, extreme climate events, displacement and other consequences of global heating. These conflicts and the use of nuclear weapons to assert political and military power with claimed impunity undermine the international cooperation needed to address the climate crisis and other shared challenges. Nuclear arsenals and growing military expenditures not only make conflicts more dangerous and deadly, but have huge opportunity costs, as vast resources are diverted from addressing the real needs of people and planet. Military organisations and activities are also large emitters of greenhouse gases, rarely measured or reported and largely unconstrained.
Apart from being slow, now the most expensive energy source, associated with risks of catastrophic accidents, routine radioactive emissions and intractable waste challenges, nuclear power inseparably creates the capacity to build nuclear weapons. Its promotion as a somewhat low carbon energy source is largely by vested interests and for political and potential proliferation purposes. Facilities to enrich uranium for nuclear reactors can readily enrich it to weapons grade, and the plutonium inevitably produced from uranium inside a nuclear reactor can be extracted from the spent fuel rods. Both routes have been used for proliferation of nuclear weapons. In most nuclear-armed states, the infrastructure, personnel, expertise, industrial capacity and government investments in nuclear power are also key to their nuclear weapons programs.
Nuclear facilities including reactors, spent fuel storage ponds and reprocessing plants contain vast amounts of long-lived radioactive materials. They are effectively pre-positioned large radiological weapons or ‘dirty bombs’, vulnerable to direct military attack or disruption to electricity and water supplies essential for continuous cooling. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has starkly highlighted the dangers of a radiological disaster from nuclear facilities in a war zone, particularly with military attacks on, occupation and weaponisation of the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant and destruction of the Kakhovka Dam which provided cooling water.
A healthy and sustainable future for all life on Earth requires rapid transition to renewable energy and net zero greenhouse gas emissions, and that we prohibit and eliminate nuclear weapons before they eliminate us. Nuclear weapons should concern everyone working to avoid climate chaos. Nuclear disarmament is climate action, and effective climate action will help prevent nuclear war. Virtually every species will be harmed in a nuclear war and by global heating; only one species can stop them.
Tilman Ruff AO is immediate past Co-President and a board member of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (Nobel Peace Prize 1985); and co-founder and founding international and Australian Chair of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), awarded the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize, the first to an entity born in Australia. He is Hon Principal Fellow in the School of Population and Global Health, University of Melbourne, and a member of the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons Scientific Network.
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