Nuclear Weapons and Climate Change

Summary

Nuclear weapons and climate are deeply interconnected. The hospitable and stable climate required for human and biosphere health needs protecting from both rampant global heating and nuclear war. The smoke from burning cities ignited by even a nuclear war involving 2% of the global nuclear arsenal would suddenly plummet temperatures worldwide to ice age levels, decimate agriculture, disrupt ocean food chains and condemn over two billion people to starve to death.

A climate-stressed world is an even more dangerous place for nuclear weapons. Over the last decade, the number of armed conflicts and their casualties have steadily grown, exacerbated by food and water insecurity, worsening poverty, extreme climate events, displacement and other consequences of global heating. These conflicts and the use of nuclear weapons to assert political and military power with claimed impunity undermine the international cooperation needed to address the climate crisis and other shared challenges. Nuclear arsenals and growing military expenditures not only make conflicts more dangerous and deadly, but have huge opportunity costs, as vast resources are diverted from addressing the real needs of people and planet. Military organisations and activities are also large emitters of greenhouse gases, rarely measured or reported and largely unconstrained.

Apart from being slow, now the most expensive energy source, associated with risks of catastrophic accidents, routine radioactive emissions and intractable waste, nuclear power inseparably creates the capacity to build nuclear weapons. Its promotion as a somewhat low carbon energy source is largely by vested interests and for political and potential proliferation purposes. Facilities to enrich uranium for nuclear reactors can readily enrich it to weapons grade, and the plutonium inevitably produced from uranium inside a nuclear reactor can be extracted from the spent fuel rods. Both routes have been used for proliferation of nuclear weapons. In most nuclear-armed states, the infrastructure, personnel, expertise, industrial capacity and government investments in nuclear power are also key to their nuclear weapons programs.

Nuclear facilities including reactors, spent fuel storage ponds and reprocessing plants contain vast amounts of long-lived radioactive materials. They are effectively pre-positioned large radiological weapons or ‘dirty bombs’, vulnerable to direct military attack or disruption to electricity and water supplies essential for continuous cooling. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has starkly highlighted the dangers of a radiological disaster from nuclear facilities in a war zone, particularly with military attacks on, occupation and weaponisation of the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant and destruction of the Kakhovka Dam which provided cooling water.

A healthy and sustainable future for all life on Earth requires rapid transition to renewable energy and net zero greenhouse gas emissions, and that we prohibit and eliminate nuclear weapons before they eliminate us. Virtually every species will be harmed in a nuclear war and by global heating; only one species can stop them.