All hotspots escalate---disease, social breakdown, and state collapse ensure nuclear war.

Michael Klare: Yes, I think the Pentagon’s view of climate change, I think, is very distinctive and not well understood by the American public, and that’s why I think it’s so important, and that is that the Department of Defense sees climate change as… The term they use is as a threat multiplier. They say, look, we look out at the world and part of our job is to forecast ahead of time where our threat’s going to emerge to US security around the world. That’s our job, and to prepare for those threats, and we see that climate change is going to multiply threats in areas of the world that are already unstable, that are already suffering from scarcities of resources, where populations are divided and where resources are scarce and contested, and that this is going to create a multitude of new challenges for the United States and its allies around the world.

So, this notion of a threat multiplier is very much a part of the Pentagon’s understanding of climate change. What they mean by that is that societies are vulnerable in many ways and especially societies that are divided along ethnic and religious and racial lines as so many societies are, and if resources are scarce, housing, water, food, jobs, whatever, climate change is going to exacerbate these divisions within societies, including American society for that matter, but it’s going to exacerbate divisions around the world and it’s going to create a social breakdown and state collapse. And, the consequence of state collapse could include increased pandemics for example, and contribute to the spread of disease. It’s going to lead to mass migrations and mass migrations are going to become a growing problem for the US.

The influx of migrants on America’s Southern border, many of these people today are coming from Central America and from an area that’s suffering from extreme drought and where crop failure has become widespread, and people can’t earn an income and they’re fleeing to the United States in desperation. Well, this is something the military has been studying and talking about for a long time as a consequence of climate change, as an example of the ways in which climate change is going to multiply schisms in society and threats of all kinds that ultimately will endanger the United States, but it’s going to fall on their shoulders to cope with and creating humanitarian disasters and migratory problems.

And as I say, this is not what they view as their primary responsibility. They want to prepare for high-tech warfare with China and Russia, and they see all of this as a tremendous distraction, which will undermine their ability to defend the United States against its primary adversaries. So, it’s multiplying the threats and dangers to the United States on multiple levels including, and we have to talk about this, threats to the homeland itself.

Lucas Perry: I think one thing you do really well in your book is you give a lot of examples of natural disasters that have occurred recently, which will only increase with the existence of climate change as well as areas which are already experiencing climate change, and you give lots of examples about how that increases stress in the region. Before we move on to those examples, I just want to more clearly lay out all the ways in which climate change just makes everything worse. So, there’s the sense in which it stresses everything that is already stressed. Everything basically becomes more difficult and challenging, and so you mentioned things like mass migration, the increase of disease and pandemics, the increase of terrorism in destabilized regions, states may begin to collapse. There is, again, this idea of threat multiplication, so everything that’s already bad gets worse.

Lucas Perry: There’s loss of food, water, and shelter instability. There’s an increase in natural disasters from more and more extreme weather. This all leads to more resource competition and also energy crises as rivers dry up and electric dams stop working and the energy grid gets taxed more and more due to the extreme weather. So, is there anything else that you’d like to add here in terms of the specific ways in which things get worse and worse from the factor of threat multiplication?

Michael Klare: Then, you start getting kind of specific about particular places that could be affected, and the Pentagon would say, well this is first going to happen in the most vulnerable societies, poor countries, Central America, North Africa, places like that where society is already divided, poor, and the capacity to cope with disaster is very low. So, climate change will come along and conditions will deteriorate, and the state is unable to cope and you have breakdown and you have these migrations, but they also worry that as time goes on and climate change intensifies, that a bigger and bigger or richer and richer and more important states will begin to disintegrate, and some of these states are very important to US security and some of them have nuclear weapons, and then you have really serious dangers. For example, they worry a great deal about Pakistan.

Pakistan is a nuclear armed country. It’s also deeply divided along ethnic and religious lines, and it has multiple vulnerabilities to climate change. It goes between extremes of water scarcity, which will increase as the Himalayan glaciers disappear, but also we know that monsoons are likely to become more erratic and more destructive with more flooding.

All of these pose great threats to the ability of Pakistan’s government and society to cope with all of its internal divisions, which are already severe to begin with, and what happens when Pakistan experiences a state collapse and nuclear weapons begin to disappear into the hands of the Taliban or to forces close to the Taliban, then you have a level of worry and concern much greater than anything we’ve been talking before, and this is something that the Pentagon has started to worry about and to develop contingency plans for. And, there are other examples of this level of potential threat arising from bigger and more powerful states disintegrating. Saudi Arabia is at risk, Nigeria is at risk, the Philippines, a major ally in the Pacific is at extreme risk from rising waters and extreme storms, and I can continue, but from a strategic point of view, this starts getting very worrisome for the Department of Defense.

Lucas Perry: Could you also paint a little bit of a picture of how climate change will exacerbate the conditions between Pakistan, India, and China, especially given that they’re all nuclear weapon states?

Michael Klare: Absolutely, and this all goes back to water and many of us view water scarcity as the greatest danger arising from climate change in many parts of the world. In the case of India, China, Pakistan, not to mention a whole host of other countries depend very heavily on rivers that originate in the Himalayan mountains and draw a fair percentage of their water from the melting of the Himalayan glaciers and these glaciers are disappearing at a very rapid rate and are expected to lose a very large percentage of their mass by the end of this century due to warming temperatures.

And, this means that these critical rivers that are shared by these countries, the Indus River shared by India and Pakistan, the Brahmaputra River shared by India and China, these rivers, which provide the water for irrigation for hundreds of millions of people if not billions of people, depend on these rivers, the Mekong is another. As the water supply begins to diminish, this is going to exacerbate border disputes. All of these countries, Indian and China, Indian and Pakistan have border and territorial disputes. They have very restive agricultural populations to start with, that water scarcity is going to be the tipping point that will produce massive local violence that will lead to conflict between these countries, all of them nuclear armed.

Lucas Perry: So, to paint a little bit more of a picture of these historical examples of states essentially failing to be able to respond to climate events and the kind of destructive force that was to society and to the status of humanitarian conditions and the increasing need for humanitarian operations, so can you describe what happened in Tacloban for example, as well as what is going on in the Nigerian region?

Michael Klare: So, Tacloban is a major city on the island of Leyte in the Philippines, and it was a direct hit. It suffered a direct hit from Typhoon Haiyan in 2013. This was the most powerful typhoon to make landfall up until that point, an extremely powerful storm that created millions of homeless in the Philippines. Many people perished, but Tacloban was at the forefront of this. A city of several hundred thousand, many poor people living in low lying areas at the forefront of the storm. The storm surge was 10 or 20 feet high. That just over overwhelmed these low lying shanty towns, flooded them. Thousands of people died right away. The entire infrastructure of the city collapsed was destroyed, hospitals, everything. Food ran out, water ran out, and there was an element of despair and chaos. The Philippine government proved incapable of doing anything.

And, President Obama ordered the US Pacific Command to provide emergency assistance, and it sent almost the entire US Pacific fleet to Tacloban to provide emergency assistance on the scale of a major war, aircraft carrier, dozens of warships, hundreds of planes, thousands of troops to provide emergency assistance. Now, it was a wonderful sign of US aid. There are a number of elements of this crisis that are worthy of mention. In addition to all of this, one was the fact that there was anti-government rioting because of the failure of the local authorities to provide assistance or to provide it only to wealthy people in the town, and this is so often a characteristic of these disasters that assistance is not provided equitably, and the same thing was seen with Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans and this then becomes a new source of conflict.

When a disaster occurs and you do not have equitable emergency response, and some people are denied help and others are provided assistance, you’re setting the stage for future conflicts and anti-government violence, which is what happened in Tacloban And the US military had to intercede to calm things down, and this is something that has altered US thinking about humanitarian assistance because now they understand that it’s not just going to be handing out food and water, it’s also going to mean playing the role of a local government and providing police assistance and mediating disputes and providing law and order, not just in foreign countries, but in the United States itself and this proved to be the case in Houston with Hurricane Harvey in 2017 and in Puerto Rico with Hurricane Maria when local authorities simply disappeared or broke down and the military had to step in and play the role of government, which comes back to what I’ve been saying all along. From the military’s point of view, this is not what they were trained to do.

This is not what they want to do, and they view this as a distraction from their primary military function. So, here’s the Pacific fleet engaging in this very complex emergency in the Philippines, and what if there were a crisis with China that were to break out? The whole force would have been immobilized at that time, and this is the kind of worry that they have that climate change is going to create these complex emergencies they call them, or complex disasters that are going to require not just a quick in and out kind of situation, but a permanent or semi-permanent involvement in a disaster area and to provide services for which the military is not adequately prepared, but they see that climate change increasingly will force them to play this kind of role and thereby distracting them from what they see as their more important mission.

Lucas Perry: Right, so there’s this sense of the military increasingly being deployed in areas to provide humanitarian assistance. It’s obvious why that would be important and needed domestically in the United States and its territories. Can you explain why the military is incentivized or interested in providing global humanitarian assistance?

Michael Klare: This has always been part of American foreign policy, American diplomacy, winning friends, winning over friends and allies. So, it’s partly to make the United States look good particularly when other countries are not capable of doing that. We’re the one country that has that kind of global naval capacity to go anywhere and do that sort of thing. So, it’s a little bit a matter of showing off our capacity, but it’s also in the case of the Philippines, the Philippines plays a strategic role in US planning for conflict in the Pacific.

It is seen as a valuable ally in any future conflict with China and therefore its stability matters to the United States and the cooperation of the Philippine government is considered important and access to bases in the Philippines, for example, is considered important to the US. So, the fact that key allies of the US in the Pacific, in the Middle East and Europe are at risk of collapsing due to climate change poses a threat to the whole strategic planning of the US, which is to fight wars over there, in the forward area of operations off the coast of China, or off of Russian territory. So, we are very reliant on the stability and the capacity of key allies in these areas. So, providing humanitarian assistance and disaster relief is a part of a larger strategy of reliance on key allies in strategic parts of the world.

Lucas Perry: Can you also explain the conditions in Nigeria and how climate change has exacerbated those conditions and how this fits into the Pentagon’s perspective and interest in the issue?

Michael Klare: So, Nigeria is another country that has strategic significance for the US, not perhaps on the same scale as say Pakistan or Japan, but still important. Nigeria is a leading oil producer, not as important as it once was perhaps, but nonetheless important, but Nigeria is also a key player in peacekeeping operations throughout Africa and because the US doesn’t want to play that role itself, it relies on Nigeria for peacekeeping troops in many parts of Africa. And, Nigeria occupies a key piece of territory in Central Africa, which is it’s surrounded by countries, which are much more fragile and are threatened by terrorist organizations. So, Nigeria’s stability is very important in this larger picture, and in fact Nigeria itself is at risk from terrorist movements, especially Boko Haram and splinter groups, which continue to wreak havoc in Northern Nigeria despite years of effort by the Nigerian government to crush Boko Haram, it’s still a powerful force.

And, partly this is due to climate change. The Boko Haram operates in areas around Lake Chad, which is now a small sliver of what it once was. It has greatly diminished in size because of global warming and water mismanagement. And so, the farmers and fisher folk whose livelihood depended on Lake Chad has all been decimated. Many of them have become impoverished. The Nigerian government has proved inept and incapable of providing for their needs, and many of these people have therefore fallen prey to the appeals of recruitment by Boko Haram, young men without jobs. So, climate change is facilitating, is fueling the persistence of groups like Boko Haram and other terrorist groups in Nigeria, but that’s only part of the picture. There’s also growing conflict between pastoralists, these are herders, cattle herders whose lands are being devastated by desertification.

In this Sahel region, the southern fringe of the Sahara is expanding with climate change and driving these pastoralists into areas occupied by… These are all Muslim, the pastoralists are primarily Muslims and they’re moving into lands occupied by Christians, mainly Christian farmers, and there’s been terrible violence in the past few years, many hundreds of thousands of people displaced. Again, inept Nigerian response, and so I could go on. There’s violence in the Nigeria Delta region, the Niger Delta area in the south and in the area, their breakaway provinces. So, Nigeria is at permanent risk of breaking apart, and the US provides a lot of military aid to Nigeria and provides training. So, the US is involved in this country and faces a possibility of greater disequilibrium and greater US involvement.

Lucas Perry: Right, so I think this does a really good job of painting the picture of this factor of threat multiplication from climate change. So, climate change makes getting food, water, and shelter more difficult. There’s more extreme weather, which makes those things more difficult, which increases instability, and for places that are already not that stable, they get a lot more unstable and then states begin to collapse and you get terrorism, and then you get mass migration, and then there’s more disease spreading, so you get conditions for increased pandemics. Whether it’s in Nigeria or Pakistan and India or the Philippines or the United States and China and Russia, everything just keeps getting worse and worse and more difficult and challenging with climate change. So, could you describe the ladder of escalation of climate change related issues for the military and how that fits into all this?

Michael Klare: Well, now this is an expression that I made up to try to put this in some kind of context, drawing on the ladder of escalation from the nuclear era when the military talked about the escalation conflict from a skirmish to a small war, to a big war, to the first use of nuclear weapons, to all out nuclear war. That was the ladder of escalation of the nuclear age, and what I see happening is something of a similar nature where at present we’re still dealing mainly with these threat multiplying conditions occurring in the smaller and weaker states of Africa, Chad, Niger, Sudan and the Central American countries, Nicaragua and El Salvador, where you see all of these conditions developing, but not posing a threat to the central core of the major powers, but as climate change advances, the military expects and US intelligence agencies expect, as I indicated, that larger, stronger, richer states will experience the same kinds of consequences and dangers and begin to experience this kind of state disintegration.

So, what we’re seeing in places like Chad and Niger, which involves this skirmishing between insurgents, terrorists, and other factions in which the US is playing a remote role, is playing the role, but it’s remote to situations where a Pakistan collapses, a Nigeria collapses, a Saudi Arabia collapses would require a much greater involvement by American forces on a much larger scale and that would be the next step up the ladder of escalation arising from climate change, and then you have the possibility, as I indicated, where nuclear armed states would engage in conflict, would be drawn into conflict because of climate related factors like the melting of the Himalayan glaciers and Indian and Pakistan going to war or Indian and China going to war, or we haven’t discussed this, but another consequence of climate change is the melting of the Arctic and this is leading to competition between the US and Russia in particular for control of that area.

So, you go from disintegration of small states to disintegration of medium-sized states, to conflict between nuclear armed states, and eventually to conceivable US involvement in climate related conflicts. That would be the ladder of escalation as I see it, and on top of that, you would have multiple disasters happening simultaneously in the United States of America, which would require a massive US military response. So, you can envision, and the military certainly worries about this, a time when US forces are fully immobilized and incapable of carrying out what they see as their primary defense tasks because they’re divided. Half their forces are engaging in disaster relief in the United States and another half are dealing with these multiple disasters in the rest of the world.

Lucas Perry: So, I have a few bullet points here that you could expand upon or correct about this ladder of escalation as you describe it. So at first, there’s the humanitarian interventions where the military is running around to solve particular humanitarian disasters like in Tacloban. Then, there’s limited military operations to support allies. There’s disruptions to supply chains and the increase of failed states. There’s the conflict over resources. There’s internal climate catastrophes and complex catastrophes, which you just mentioned, and then there’s what you call climate shock waves, and finally all hell breaking loose where you have multiple failed states, tons of mass migration, a situation in which no state no matter how powerful is able to handle.

Michael Klare: Climate shock wave would be a situation where you have multiple extreme disasters occurring simultaneously in different parts of the world leading to a breakdown in the supply chains that keep the world’s economy afloat and keep food and energy supplies flowing around the world, and this is certainly a very real possibility. Scientists speak of clusters of extreme events, and we’ve begun to see that. We saw that in 2017 when Hurricane Harvey was followed immediately by Hurricane Irma in Florida, and then Hurricane Maria in the Caribbean and Puerto Rico and the US military responded to each of those events, but had some difficulty moving emergency supplies first from Houston to Florida, then to Puerto Rico. At the same time, the west of the US was burning up. There were multiple forest fires out of control and the military was also supplying emergency assistance to California, Washington State, and Oregon.

That’s an example of clusters of extreme events. Now looking into the future, scientists are predicting that this could occur in several continents simultaneously. And as a result, food supply chains would break down, and many parts of the world rely on imported grain supplies, or other food stuffs and imported energy. And in a situation like this, you could imagine a climate shockwave in which trade just collapses and entire states suffer from a major catastrophe, food catastrophes leading to state collapse and all that we’ve been talking about.

Lucas Perry: Can you describe what all hell breaking loose is?

Michael Klare: Well, this is my expression for the all of the above scenario. You have these multiple disasters occurring and one that we have not discussed at length is the threat to American bases and how that would impact on the military. So, you have these multiple disasters occurring that create a demand on the military to provide assistance domestically, like I say, many areas needing emergency assistance and not just of the obvious sort of handing out water bottles, but as I say, complex emergencies where the military is being called in to provide law and order, to restore infrastructure, to play the role of government. So, you need large capacity organizations to step in. At the same time, it’s being asked to do that in other parts of the world, or to intervene in conflicts with nuclear armed states happening simultaneously. But at the same time, its own bases have been immobilized by rising seas and flooding and fires. All of this is a very realistic scenario because parts of it have already occurred.

Lucas Perry: All right, so let’s make a little bit of a pivot here into something that you mentioned earlier, which is the melting of the Arctic. So, I’m curious if you could explain the geopolitical situation that arises from the melting of the Arctic Ocean… Sorry, the Arctic region that creates a new ocean that leads to Arctic shipping lanes, a new front to defend, and resource competition for fish, minerals, natural gas and oil.

Michael Klare: Yes, indeed. In a way, the Arctic is how the military first got interested in climate change, especially the Navy because the Navy never had much of an Arctic responsibility. It was covered with ice, so its ships couldn’t go there except for submarines on long-range patrols under the sea ice, but the Navy never had to worry about the Arctic. And then around 2009, the Department of the Navy created a climate change task force to address the consequences of a melting Arctic sea ice and came to the view that as you say, this is a new ocean that they would have to defend that they’d never thought about before, and for which they were not prepared.

Their ships were not equipped to operate, for the most part, in the Arctic. So ever since then, the Arctic has become a major geopolitical concern of the United States on multiple fronts. But two or three points in particular that need to be noted, first of all, the melting of the ice cap makes it possible to extract resources from the area, oil and natural gas, and it turns out there’s a lot of oil and natural gas buried under the ice cap, under the seabed of the Arctic and oil and gas companies are very eager to exploit those untapped reserves. So the area, what was once considered worthless, is now a valuable geo-economic prize and countries have exerted claims to the area, and some of these claims overlap. So, you have border disputes in the Arctic between Russia and the United States, Russia and Norway, Canada and Greenland, and so on. There are now border disputes because of the resources that are in these areas. And because of drilling occurring there, you now need to worry about spills and disasters occurring, so that creates a whole new level of Naval and Coast Guard operations in the Arctic. This has also led to shipping lanes opening up into the region, and who controls those shipping lanes becomes a matter of interest. Russia is trying to develop what it calls the Northern Sea Route from the Pacific to the Atlantic going across its Northern territory across Siberia, and potentially, this could save two weeks of travel for container ships, moving from Rotterdam say to Shanghai and could be commercially very important.

Russia wants to control that route but the U.S. and other countries says, “It’s not yours to control.” So, you have disputes over the sea routes. But then, more important than any of the above is that Russia has militarized its portion of the Arctic, which is the largest portion, and this has become a new frontier for U.S.-Russian military competition, and there has been a huge increase in military exercises, base construction. Now, from the U.S. point of view, the Arctic is a new front in the future war with Russia and they’re training for this all the time.

Lucas Perry: Could you explain how the Bering Strait fits in?

Michael Klare: The Bering Strait between the U.S. and Russia is a pretty narrow space and that’s the only way to get from the North Pacific into the Arctic region, whether you’re going to Northern Alaska and Northern Canada, or to across from China and Japan, across the Northern Sea Route to Europe. So, this becomes a strategic passage way, the way Gibraltar has been the past. And both the U.S. and Russia are fortifying that passageway and there’s constant tussling going on there. It doesn’t get reported much, but every other week or so, Russia will send up its war planes right to the edge of U.S. airspace in that region, or the U.S. will send its planes into the edge of Russian airspace to test their reflexes and their naval maneuvers happening all the time. So, this has become seen as a important strategic place on the global chessboard.

Lucas Perry: How does climate change affect the Bering Strait?

Michael Klare: Well, it affects it in the sense that it’s become the entry point to the Arctic and the climate change has made the Arctic a place you want to go that it wasn’t before.

Lucas Perry: All right. So, one point that you made in your book that I like to highlight is that the Arctic is seen as a main place for conflict between the great powers in the coming years. Is that correct?

Michael Klare: Yes. For the U.S. and Russia, it’s important, here we would focus more on the Barents Sea, the area above Norway, and just, it helps of course to have a map in your mind, but Russia shares the border with Norway in it’s extreme north. And that part of Russia is the Kola Peninsula, and it’s where the City of Murmansk is located, and that’s the headquarters of Russia’s Northern Fleet and where it keeps its nuclear or missile submarines are based there. So, that’s how, that’s one of Russia’s few ways of access into the Atlantic Ocean from its own territory, from its major naval port at Murmansk. The waters adjacent to Northern Norway and Russia, like on the other side, have become a strategic, very important strategic military location. The U.S. has started building military bases with Norway in that area close to the Russian border. We’ve now stationed B-1 bombers in that area, so it is seen as a likely first area of conflict in the event of a war between the U.S. and Russia is going to occur at that spot.

Climate change figures into this because Russia views its Arctic region as critical economically as well as strategically and is building up its military forces there. And therefore, from U.S. NATO point of view, it’s a more strategically important region. But you ask about China, and China has become very interested in the Arctic as a source of raw materials, but also as a strategic passageway from its east coast to Europe for the reason I indicated, if once the ice cap melts, they’ll be able to ship goods to Europe in much shorter space of time and bring goods back if they can go through the Arctic. But China also is very interested in drilling for energy at the Arctic and for minerals, there are a lot of valuable minerals believed to be in Greenland.

You can’t get to those now because Greenland is covered with ice. But as that ice melts, which it’s doing at a rapid rate, the ground is becoming exposed and mining activities have begun there for things like uranium, and rare earths, and other valuable minerals. China is very deeply interested in mining there and this has led to diplomatic maneuverings, didn’t Donald Trump once talk about buying Greenland, to geopolitical competition between the U.S. and China over Greenland and this area.

Lucas Perry: Are there any ongoing proposals for how to resolve territorial disputes in the Arctic?

Michael Klare: Well, the shorter answer is no, there’s talk, there is something called the Arctic Council and this is an organization of the states that occupy territory in the Arctic region and it has some very positive environmental agendas and had some success in addressing non-geopolitical issues. But it has not been given the authority to address territorial disputes that members have resisted that. So, you don’t have a, it’s not a forum that would provide for that. There is a mechanism under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea that allows for adjudication of off shore territorial disputes and it’s possible that that could be a forum for discussion, but mostly, these disputes have remained unresolved.

Lucas Perry: I don’t know much about this. Does that have something to do with, you have so many, you have X many miles from your sea shelf or something having to do with like the tectonic plates or ocean something.

Michael Klare: I can… Yes, so under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, you’re allowed a 200 nautical mile exclusive economic zone off your coastline. Every, any coastal country can claim 200 nautical miles. But you’re also allowed an extra 150 miles if your outer continental shelf, if you can prove scientifically that your outer continental shelf extends beyond 200 nautical miles, then you can extend your EEZ another 150 nautical miles out to 350 nautical miles. And the Northern Arctic has islands and territories that have allowed contending states to claim overlapping EEZs-

Lucas Perry: Oh, okay.

Michael Klare: … on this bases.

Lucas Perry: I see.

Michael Klare: And Russia has claimed vast areas of the Arctic as part of its outer continental shelf. But the great imperial power of Denmark, which territorially, is one of the largest imperial powers on earth because it owns Greenland, and Greenland also has an extended outer continental shelf that overlaps with Russia’s, as does Canada’s. You have to picture the looking down, not on the kind of wall maps we have of the world in our classrooms that make the Arctic look huge, but from a global map, everything comes closer together up there. And so, these extended EEZs overlap and so Greenland, and Canada, and Russia are all claiming the North Pole.

Lucas Perry: Okay. So, I think that paints really well the picture of the already existing and conflict there and how it will likely only get worse in terms of the amount of conflict. It’d be great if we could focus a bit on nuclear weapons risk in climate change in particular. I’m curious if you could explain the DOD’s concerns an improving China, and a nuclear North Korea, and India, and Pakistan, and other nuclear states in this evolving situation of increasing territorial disputes due to climate change.

Michael Klare: From a nuclear war perspective, the two greatest dangers I think and I’ve mentioned these, one is the collapse or the disappearance of the Himalayan Glaciers, sparking a war between India and China that would go nuclear, or one between India and Pakistan that would go nuclear. That’s one climate-related risk of nuclear escalation. The other is in the Arctic, and here, I think the danger is the fact that Russia has turned the Arctic into a major stronghold for its nuclear weapons capabilities. It stations a large share of its nuclear retaliatory, warheads on submarines, and other forces that are based in the Arctic. And so, in the event of a conflict between the U.S. and Russia, this could very well take place in the Arctic region and trigger the use of nuclear weapons as a consequence.