The Marshall Islands are filing lawsuits against the nine
nuclear powers to get them to step up to their obligations under the Nuclear
Non-Proliferation Treaty to negotiate total nuclear disarmament. Meanwhile Bill
McKibben is gathering citizens for a rally in support of urgent action on
climate change in New York on September 21st and 22nd,
where the next climate summit will be held.
No two trans-national issues are more closely related than
the abolition of nuclear weapons and global climate instability, for three
reasons: first, nuclear war is the biggest potential accelerant of life-threatening
climate change; second, the resources desperately needed to address climate
issues continue to be poured into nuclear weapons and their delivery systems;
and third, the solution to both challenges depends upon the same new way of
thinking based in the reality that national and international self-interests
have merged.
If India and Pakistan, or the U.S. and Russia, should back
into a nuclear war, the glare of the explosions will vaporize our most
cherished assumptions along with the victims. Survivors will ask, how was it that
we ever thought that we could achieve security with these infernal
machines? What were we all
thinking, national leaders, the thousands of workers who build them, the lawmakers
who finance them by siphoning tax dollars away from schools and mass transit,
the coolly rational generals who seek budgetary increases for ever shinier toys?
Their moral authority will be as devastated as the cratered moonscapes left by
the destruction.
In 2007 the late Jonathan Schell spoke presciently about the
relationship between nuclear weapons and climate change: “When I wrote The Fate of the Earth in 1982, I said
that, first and foremost, nuclear weapons were an ecological danger. It wasn’t
that our species could be directly wiped out by nuclear war down to the last
person. That would only happen through the destruction to the underpinnings of
life, through nuclear winter, radiation, ozone loss. There has been an oddity
of timing, because when the nuclear weapon was invented, people didn’t even use
the word “environment” or “ecosphere.” The environmental movement was born
later. So in a certain sense the most urgent ecological threat of them all was
born before the context in which you could understand it. The present larger
ecological crisis is that context. In other words, global warming and nuclear
war are two different ways that humanity threatens to undo the natural
underpinnings of human, and of all other, life . . . we may be in a better
position today, because of global warming, to grasp the real import of nuclear
danger.”
The second way that global climate change and nuclear
weapons are intertwined is through how we allocate our money and creativity. While
President Obama has paid lip service to abolition, the U.S. government has
continued to modernize existing weapons at grotesque expense, and other nuclear
nations are following suit. The Ploughshares Fund estimates that in the maintenance
and development of nuclear weapons, America will spend approximately 640
billion dollars over the next decade. Not only all this money, but scientific expertise
as well, will be focused upon obsolete defense strategies whose endgame is inevitably
suicidal—when doing too little about climate change is equally suicidal, just
gradual rather than sudden. Many heads of multinational corporations and their
minions in national legislatures deny the climate crisis because they fear
their bottom line will be threatened by sensible solutions like a carbon tax. Security,
economic growth and full employment will best be achieved, in their view, if we
base our economy upon building more ships, planes and weapons rather than solar
panels and super insulated buildings.
Citizens everywhere are waking up to the opportunity costs
of this paradigm, because even greater threats to each separate nation’s
security loom if we do not use the international economic system to transition
out of fossil fuels into clean, renewable sources of energy. 640 billion
dollars would be more than enough to help not only the U.S. but also the planet
move into a green economy based upon building windmills not missiles. What will
awaken the political will to enact this global shift? The answer is in the
third way that nuclear weapons and climate change are connected.
Everything changes when we change our minds. We have been
stuck in an old mode of self-interest based on the nation-state. No victory is possible
from a nuclear war, only nuclear winter; similarly, no victory is possible if
the forces of international competition devour our planetary resources to the
point of no return. A vision beckons of security based in mutually verifiable
treaties leading to zero nuclear weapons, and an economy unleashed by building the
infrastructure that will stabilize our climate with green energy.
The language of international politics and diplomacy caters
to obsolete competitive notions of self-interest meant to soothe domestic
national fears. Sadly, much that governments do in the present paradigm— games
of chicken, enemy-stereotyping, endless jockeying for advantage—increases both
the likelihood of nuclear war somewhere down the time-stream and does nothing
to mitigate growing climate instability.
The two-in-one of climate change and nuclear abolition is
not something to be addressed after supposedly more immediate brush-fires are
extinguished; by viewing it instead as a single challenge, an opportunity for
cooperative prevention based in planetary self-interest, success will become a model
for resolving more local conflicts without violence.
The Marshall Islands, which endured atomic testing, are
courageous to speak for the powerless in bringing suit against the mighty nuclear
powers. In 2013 they appealed to the U.N. for more help with climate change, already
a life-and-death issue for these low-lying atolls, but soon enough for all of
us.
