Climate and Nuclear Threats

We live in an age of twin menaces: climate change and nuclear weapons.  In a recent book by Robert Lifton, these menaces are intertwined in his book entitled Climate Swerve (public library).  As Lifton points out, we are in a predicament and that is that people’s awareness of climate change is evolving, and as he says that is a source of hope.

Lifton has spent a lifetime writing about nuclear weapons, and it was during those sixty years that he met people and events related to the climate story, and now he writes that he is part of the climate swerve.

Lifton writes that his work on climate change has “evolved” by his decades of “the mind’s relationship to murderous nuclear devices and the world ending threat they pose.”

Climate change  and nuclear threats exist simultaneously.  And indeed, Lifton says that we simply can’t avoid confronting either the nuclear or the climate threat.  He writes that his role is as follows:

My portion of it—the task I have set for myself—is the comparison of nuclear and climate threats as a way of focusing on the dilemmas we face in connection with our own prior and contemporary actions (Emphasis mine).  I make no claim that this perspective will in itself decrease our carbon emissions or stem the overall rise in sea levels. But even as it enables us to take another look at the still-pervasive nuclear danger, I believe it can offer a measure of insight into grasping our climate menace and acting on it.  Lifton, Robert Jay. The Climate Swerve: Reflections on Mind, Hope, and Survival (Kindle Locations 88-92). The New Press. Kindle Edition.

Although I’ve included a brief discussion of the threats below, there is a concept that Lifton briefly brought up in his book, and that is the notion of a Nuclear Winter.  It is in this discussion that Lifton brings the two threats together.  A nuclear winter is a period of abnormal cold and darkness predicted to follow a nuclear war, caused by a layer of smoke and dust in the atmosphere blocking the sun’s rays.  According to some scientists, an all out nuclear war in which 100 or more nuclear devices were detonated over major cities, would potentially set the earth up for unprecedented changes in its weather and climate.  The concept of a nuclear winter, with its critics in mind, is an idea that has been discussed for decades.  As Lifton states, “it is an ultimate form of devastation.” The nuclear threat, according to some, will lead to a dramatic affect on the Earth’s environment.

We’ll explore climate and nuclear threats in more detail in the next two posts, beginning with the Climate threat.