No defense---there’s dozens of hotspots, primed for nuclear draw-in that ends the species.

Although there may at first glance appear to be no close linkage between weapons of mass destruction and food, in the twenty-first century with world resources of food, land and water under growing stress, nothing can be ruled out. Indeed, chemical weapons have frequently been deployed in the Syrian civil war, which had drought, agricultural failure and hunger among its early drivers. And nuclear conflict remains a distinct possibility in South Asia and the Middle East, especially, as these regions are already stressed in terms of food, land and water, and their nuclear firepower or access to nuclear materials is multiplying.

It remains an open question whether panicking regimes in Russia, the USA or even France would be ruthless enough to deploy atomic weapons in an attempt to quell invasion by tens of millions of desperate refugees, fleeing famine and climate chaos in their own homelands – but the possibility ought not to be ignored.

That nuclear war is at least a possible outcome of food and climate crises was first flagged in the report The Age of Consequences by Kurt Campbell and the US-based Centre for Strategic and International Studies, which stated ‘it is clear that even nuclear war cannot be excluded as a political consequence of global warming’. 15 Food insecurity is therefore a driver in the preconditions for the use of nuclear weapons, whether limited or unlimited.

A global famine is a likely outcome of limited use of nuclear weapons by any country or countries – and would be unavoidable in the event of an unlimited nuclear war between America and Russia, making it unwinnable for either. And that, as the mute hands of the ‘Doomsday Clock’ so eloquently admonish, is also the most likely scenario for the premature termination of the human species.

Such a grim scenario can be alleviated by two measures: the voluntary banning by the whole of humanity of nuclear weapons, their technology, materials and stocks – and by a global effort to secure food against future insecurity by diverting the funds now wasted on nuclear armaments into building the sustainable food and water systems of the future (see Chapters 8 and 9).