Climate change and nuclear weapons are both man-made threats that put humanity’s very survival at risk. The two threats are also interconnected in ways that mutually exacerbate the risks and impacts to people and the planet, which is why they are also referred to as the ‘twin existential threats’

Climate change makes conflict and instability more likely in the world, which, in turn, makes nuclear conflict more likely.

The impacts of climate change have an impact on the deployment of nuclear weapons as the military has to deal with flash floods, wildfires and excessive heat impacting on infrastructure.

The use of nuclear weapons would lead to longer terms impacts on a climate that is already becoming unstable.

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If you have a nuclear war that explodes a blanketing cloud of dust and debris into the atmosphere, you could trigger a nuclear winter. One calculation showed that a one-week nuclear war between India and Pakistan could kill more than 2 billion people. Nor does a nuclear winter cancel out global warming as many of the mechanism driving both are the same and instead you speed up the chaotic trends that are going to make this planet difficult for us to live on.

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The 2022 US National Defense Strategy makes clear that climate is a major issue for national security. Climate change is a conflict multiplier and a threat to military bases, and the Pentagon is the world’s biggest single emitter of greenhouse gases.

For example, a 2019 flash flood at Incirlik Air Base in Türkiye, used for storing nuclear weapons, left the base without drinking water for 24 hours and parts of the base where made inoperable.

Extreme temperatures can melt and overload the existing infrastructure that military bases rely upon, as it simply isn’t designed for unrelenting heat that is coming to southern Europe and Turkey.

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The civil war in Sudan is seen as the world’s first climate war with erratic rainfall and failing crops leading to migration and conflict. The Sahara Desert has been expanding by almost one mile every year. There are now 2m people in refugee camps and large numbers have fled abroad.

We are starting to see a new pattern in the developing nations of the world – some are going backwards. A region, or a country, can survive a major environmental shock such as drought, or flooding, every few years. However, the investment in rebuilding, in recreating the knowledge and innovation for a society to have momentum, is harder if the shocks are so frequent that you can’t even get back to where you were.

These are the early days of a climate crisis. Yet, Climate and conflict were the main causes of acute food insecurity for almost 174 million people in 2022. Things will get worse and the number of failing countries will increase, along with a migration crisis that will put neighbouring nations under stress.

The technological shift to economies powered by a renewables has led to a shift in what resources are desirable. Russia and China have both acted fast to ringfence those resources and that is setting up a direct conflict with the west. The scrabble the 23 key resources, including lithium and cobalt, could well end badly.

Optimism

This is why we need to change our lifestyles, not just our technology. We have to use less, use it smarter and have fun in ways that don’t kill the planet.

Action is urgent. Change is happening but it needs to go so much faster if we are to avoid the world plunging down into barbarism. Humanity has gone through bad times before but we have never before faced a combination of bad times AND mass nuclear arsenals.