Today, ICAN Australia has published a new briefing paper titled Nuclear Weapons and Our Climate, written by ICAN co-founder, A/Prof Tilman Ruff AO. In the lead up to the climate COP29, this timely paper sharply lays out how the “two paramount human-made existential threats we confront—nuclear weapons and climate change—exacerbate each other and need to be addressed together—with utmost urgency,” writes A/Prof Ruff. “One harms us and our biosphere every day, the other could deplete it irrevocably and end human civilisation and many species in less than a day.”

“Many of us don’t appreciate that nuclear war is a climate issue, and that the hospitable and stable climate required for human and biosphere health needs protecting from both global heating and the ice age conditions that even a ‘small’ nuclear war would cause,” says A/Prof Ruff.

The paper’s key findings are:

• Smoke from burning cities ignited by a nuclear war involving 2% of the global arsenal would suddenly plummet temperatures worldwide to ice age levels, decimate agriculture, disrupt ocean food chains and starve to death over two billion people.
• Militaries are large and mostly unconstrained greenhouse gas emitters. Growing conflicts and nuclear threats undermine international cooperation needed to address the climate crisis. Rising military spending and nuclear arsenals have huge opportunity costs and make conflicts more dangerous. An increased risk of war leading to nuclear escalation is the greatest danger of the climate crisis.
• Nuclear power inseparably creates the capacity to build 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 reactors, spent fuel storage ponds and reprocessing plants are effectively pre-positioned large radiological weapons, vulnerable to direct attack or disruption of power and water for essential cooling. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has seen, for the first time, multiple nuclear power plants attacked and weaponised in war, risking a radiological disaster.

The paper is a call to action, as “everyone everywhere, everything we treasure and our living planet is threatened by nuclear weapons, this is everyone’s business.”