Warming’s a conflict multiplier

Climate change and nuclear weapons represent two key threats of our time. Climate change endangers ecosystems and social systems all over the world. The degradation of natural resources, the decline of water and food supplies, forced migration, and more frequent and intense disasters will greatly affect population clusters, big and small. Climate-related shocks will add stress to the world’s existing conflicts and act as a “threat multiplier” in already fragile regions. This could contribute to a decline of international stability and trigger hostility between people and nations. Meanwhile, the 15,500 nuclear weapons that remain in the arsenals of only a few states possess the destructive force to destroy life on Earth as we know multiple times over. With nuclear deterrence strategies still in place, and hundreds of weapons on ‘hair trigger alert’, the risks of nuclear war caused by accident, miscalculation or intent remain plentiful and imminent. Despite growing recognition that climate change and nuclear weapons pose critical security risks, the linkages between both threats are largely ignored. However, nuclear and climate risks interfere with each other in a mutually enforcing way. Conflicts induced by climate change could contribute to global insecurity, which, in turn, could enhance the chance of a nuclear weapon being used, could create more fertile breeding grounds for terrorism, including nuclear terrorism, and could feed the ambitions among some states to acquire nuclear arms. Furthermore, as evidenced by a series of incidents in recent years, extreme weather events, environmental degradation and major seismic events can directly impact the safety and security of nuclear installations. Moreover, a nuclear war could lead to a rapid and prolonged drop in average global temperatures and significantly disrupt the global climate for years to come, which would have disastrous implications for agriculture, threatening the food supply for most of the world. Finally, climate change, nuclear weapons and nuclear energy pose threats of intergenerational harm, as evidenced by the transgenerational effects of nuclear testing and nuclear power accidents and the lasting impacts on the climate, environment and public health by carbon emissions.