The nuclear threat burst into public consciousness more than seventy years ago, and has gripped the world’s attention ever since. From the time when Godzilla romped through Tokyo and Major Kong rode a nuclear bomb down to its target in Strangelove, filmmakers have found the drama of nuclear weapons irresistible. In 1983, ABC televised The Day After, to try to make the unthinkable somehow credible and concrete through ghastly and ghostly renderings of a U.S. town obliterated by a nuclear bomb. Subsequent films like WarGames Broken Arrow, and The Sum of All Fears have tapped into the deep-seated anxiety about the nuclear threat.
Hollywood’s obsession has formed part of the warp and woof of the American body politic. From the outset, the nuclear threat was acknowledged and earnestly addressed in multiple dimensions, from superpower deterrence theory and arms control agreements during the Cold War, to the Cooperative Threat Reduction (CTR) legislation sponsored by Senators Sam Nunn and Richard Lugar in 1991, to multilateral export controls launched early in the Cold War and continuing to this day. These efforts, while hotly debated, have actually been embedded in a remarkably stable bipartisan consensus in the United States, which itself has formed part of a nearly universal worldwide ban against the proliferation of nuclear weapons, as codified in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). With 191 states party to this agreement, the NPT is one of the most widely adopted treaties in history. |
By contrast, the climate threat developed more slowly, with carbon dioxide emissions surging as a consequence of the Industrial Revolution beginning more than a century ago. Perhaps not surprisingly, this problem has also been absorbed into public consciousness much more slowly. Concern about air and water pollution came first, in such 1960s classics as Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (ITALICS), which alerted the public to the adverse environmental impacts of pesticides, and immortalized in the ironic lyrics of songwriter and MIT mathematician Tom Lehrer:
“If you visit American city
You will find it very pretty.
Just one thing of which you must beware:
Don’t drink the water and don’t breathe the air!”
You will find it very pretty.
Just one thing of which you must beware:
Don’t drink the water and don’t breathe the air!”
Concern over pollution let to a number of important U.S. actions designed to curtail that threat, including the Clean Air Act of 1970 and the Clean Water Act of 1977. But the collective impact of those measures has been dwarfed by the dramatic rise of carbon dioxide levels in the earth’s atmosphere. Indeed, recent years have brought an avalanche of data marking an alarming acceleration of climate change, and alongside it a growing international consensus that urgent action is required to address it. While scientific consensus on both the seriousness of the threat and the anthropogenic source of it is nearly universal, the politics of climate change have never approached the level of consensus surrounding the nature of the nuclear threat. As a consequence, nothing like the bedrock of bipartisan consensus that has supported deterrence and non-proliferation policy has been achieved in the United States when it comes to climate change. Instead, many Americans and their elected representatives remain deeply skeptical about the threat of climate change.
In recent decades, both nuclear and climate threats have consumed oceans of ink and generated countless policy proposals, diplomatic conferences, books, articles, flyers, email and tweets. And we have seen practical results. On the security front, after the end of the Cold War, out of the dissolution of the Soviet Union, only one nuclear weapon state emerged, as the leaders of Kazakhstan, Ukraine, and Belarus were persuaded either to destroy the nuclear weapons on their soil or to ship them to Russia and, in turn, to become parties to the Nuclear Non-Proliferations Treaty as non-weapon states. Thousands of warheads were dismantled and nuclear weapons stocks were converted to peaceful commercial uses as reactor fuel; hundreds of security improvements were instituted at scores of nuclear installations around the world; and efforts to combat nuclear terrorism were strengthened.
In recent decades, both nuclear and climate threats have consumed oceans of ink and generated countless policy proposals, diplomatic conferences, books, articles, flyers, email and tweets. And we have seen practical results. On the security front, after the end of the Cold War, out of the dissolution of the Soviet Union, only one nuclear weapon state emerged, as the leaders of Kazakhstan, Ukraine, and Belarus were persuaded either to destroy the nuclear weapons on their soil or to ship them to Russia and, in turn, to become parties to the Nuclear Non-Proliferations Treaty as non-weapon states. Thousands of warheads were dismantled and nuclear weapons stocks were converted to peaceful commercial uses as reactor fuel; hundreds of security improvements were instituted at scores of nuclear installations around the world; and efforts to combat nuclear terrorism were strengthened.
On the climate front, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was opened for signature at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. The Kyoto Protocol went even further, setting emission targets for developed countries. And after years of effort, 195 nations joined together in Paris in 2015 to sign a climate agreement that aimed to limit global warming to below two degrees Celsius in this century, and to drive efforts still further to keep warming below 1.5 degree Celsius.
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Today we face two existential threats: nuclear annihilation and catastrophic climate change. Both stem from human origins. We need to fight both threats. Aggressively. |
But many dangers remain. Perhaps most egregiously, North Korea continues to flaunt its weapons and flout the international community, responding to the March 2016 imposition of UN sanctions by boasting that it could launch an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) to send a hydrogen bomb to “burn [Manhattan] down to ashes.” Merging the finest tradition of crude propaganda with the ubiquity of modern communication, Pyongyang posted a video on a government website that opens with an ICBM launch and ends with a mushroom cloud rising over the Lincoln Memorial.
Meanwhile, damages arising from climate change continue to mount. Scientists have reported that Greenland and Antarctica’s western ice sheet are melting much faster than expected. And since 1980, warming waters have caused the time between severe bleaching episodes that are devastating coral reefs around the world to shrink from once every twenty-five years to thirty years down to once every six years – too short a time for the reefs to recover, imperiling more than a quarter of the earth’s marine species as well as the livelihood of millions of people who depend in some way on this precious ecosystem.
In short, two of the world’s most daunting menaces have placed humanity at risk, and it is not yet clear whether we will be able to avoid either catastrophe. While both of these issues are enormously complex, one common threat unites them: the power – literal and figurative – of atomic fission. The power of the atom can shatter cities, but it can also generate enormous amounts of carbon-free energy to benefit the world.…
Great effort has been invested in addressing both of these looming threats, and progress has been made. But not enough. If we do not act soon, and effectively, in tackling both problems, the world may suffer dire and irreversible consequences. Future generations may suffer from raging storms, devastating droughts, rising seas, sinking islands and coastal cities and, possibly, nuclear annihilation . They would never forgive us. Nor should they.
Meanwhile, damages arising from climate change continue to mount. Scientists have reported that Greenland and Antarctica’s western ice sheet are melting much faster than expected. And since 1980, warming waters have caused the time between severe bleaching episodes that are devastating coral reefs around the world to shrink from once every twenty-five years to thirty years down to once every six years – too short a time for the reefs to recover, imperiling more than a quarter of the earth’s marine species as well as the livelihood of millions of people who depend in some way on this precious ecosystem.
In short, two of the world’s most daunting menaces have placed humanity at risk, and it is not yet clear whether we will be able to avoid either catastrophe. While both of these issues are enormously complex, one common threat unites them: the power – literal and figurative – of atomic fission. The power of the atom can shatter cities, but it can also generate enormous amounts of carbon-free energy to benefit the world.…
Great effort has been invested in addressing both of these looming threats, and progress has been made. But not enough. If we do not act soon, and effectively, in tackling both problems, the world may suffer dire and irreversible consequences. Future generations may suffer from raging storms, devastating droughts, rising seas, sinking islands and coastal cities and, possibly, nuclear annihilation . They would never forgive us. Nor should they.