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Thirty-five years after the start of the nuclear age with the first explosion of an atomic bomb, I visited the expanse of desert known as the Nevada Test Site, an hour’s drive northwest of Las Vegas. A pair of officials from the Department of Energy took me on a tour. They explained that nuclear tests were absolutely necessary. “Nuclear weapons are like automobiles,” one told me. “Ford doesn’t put a new automobile out on the highway until they’ve gone through a lengthy test process, driving hundreds of thousands of miles.”
By then, in 1980, several hundred underground nuclear blasts had already occurred in Nevada, after the 1963 Limited Test Ban Treaty required that atomic testing take place below the earth’s surface. Previously, about 100 nuclear warheads had been set off above ground at that test site, sending mushroom clouds aloft and endangering with radiation exposure not just nearby soldiers but downwind civilians as well.
My guides from the Energy Department were upbeat. The only sober words came after one old hand at nuclear testing asked me to turn off my tape recorder. “No head of state in the world has ever seen a nuclear bomb explosion,” he said. “To me, that’s scary. I don’t think anyone who has ever seen a nuclear explosion has ever not asked the question: ‘My God, what have we done?’”
Otherwise, the on-the-record statements I got that day amounted to happy talk about the nuclear arms race. When officials showed me a quarter-mile-wide crater caused by a hydrogen bomb named Sedan, they expressed nothing but pride. “Across the windy desert floor of the Nevada Test Site, the government guides talk enthusiastically about their dominion,” I wrote then for The Nation magazine. “As the wind whips through Yucca Flats, it whispers that, left to their own ‘devices,’ the nuclear-weapons testers will destroy us all. To allow their rationales to dissuade us from opposition is to give them permission to incinerate the world.”
At the time, it never occurred to me that gradual heating, due mostly to carbon emissions sent into the atmosphere, could devastate the world, too. My visit to the Nevada site took place a year before Al Gore, then a member of the House of Representatives, convened the first-ever congressional hearing on global warming in 1981. Bill McKibben’s pathbreaking book on the subject, The End of Nature, appeared in 1989. Since then, the escalating catastrophe of human-caused climate change has become all too clear to those paying attention.
Two Existential Threats — Unrelated or Twins?
“Nearly all major global climate datasets agree that, in 2024, human-caused global warming for the first time pushed Earth’s average surface temperature to more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial average for a full calendar year, a level that countries around the world had agreed to do all they could to avoid,” Inside Climate News reported as this year began. Seven years ago, an authoritative scientific study “showed that warming beyond that limit threatens to irreversibly change major parts of the physical and biological systems that sustain life on Earth, including forests, coral reefs and rainforests, as well as oceans and their major currents.” It threatens, in short, to create what might be thought of as a climate-change heat wave on Planet Earth.
Meanwhile, the risks of a nuclear holocaust keep worsening.
A 2022 study estimated that “more than 5 billion could die from a war between the United States and Russia.” Detonating just a small percentage of the world’s nuclear weapons (which are now in the possession of nine countries) would cause “nuclear winter.” Writing in Scientific American last month after nuclear-armed India and Pakistan almost went to war, Rutgers University environmental sciences professors Alan Robock and Lili Xia explained:
“A nuclear war between India and Pakistan would produce smoke from fires in cities and industrial areas. That smoke would rise into the stratosphere, the atmospheric layer above the troposphere where we live, which has no rain to wash out the smoke. Our research has found that the smoke would block out the sun, making it cold, dark and dry at Earth’s surface, choking agriculture for five years or more around the world. The result would be global famine.”
I asked Robock whether he knew of efforts by the climate movement and groups focused on nuclear weapons to work together. “I don’t know of any,” he said. Noting that “nuclear war would produce instant climate change,” Robock added: “Global warming is real and already happening, whereas it has been 80 years since the last nuclear war. And that one produced horrific direct impacts of blast, fire, and radiation, but not climate change. Radioactivity is still the predominant fear from nuclear war… but nuclear winter would affect those far removed from the blast, and there are no direct examples to show people, except for famines produced by other causes.”
Since early in this century, Ted Glick has devoted himself largely to climate activism, with a dedication that has included long fasts. Some groups concentrating on peace or climate have begun to engage in joint efforts, he told me, “but there’s very little specific interactions that I know of when it comes to nuclear weapons, as distinct from a broader peace and anti-war focus, and the climate crisis.”
About the possibility of nuclear winter, he added:
“It could be said that it’s the ultimate climate issue because if it happened, the world’s climate would be probably unlivable for most if not all human beings and most other life forms for a very long time. However, the fact that, despite nuclear weapons existing for 80 years, there has never been since Hiroshima and Nagasaki any use of them is certainly one big reason why others of us aren’t prioritizing it. What is very clear is the threat to the world’s ecosystems and societies of continued societal dominance by the fossil-fuel industry. That is a much more certain existential threat. There is no question that if the world doesn’t decisively shift within years, not decades, away from fossil fuels, break its power over governments, the risk of worldwide ecological and social devastation is, imho, a certainty.”
Depending on Context
When I asked John J. Berger, author of the recent book Solving the Climate Crisis, to what extent nuclear winter should be viewed as a climate issue, he replied: “It depends on how the issue is contextualized. But in general, I wouldn’t confuse anthropogenic climate change stemming from fossil-fuel use with nuclear winter stemming from nuclear war. They are two distinct issues, although both impact the climate.”
Yet current literature from the Council for a Livable World emphasizes connections:
“There are two serious threats to all life on earth: nuclear war and climate change. Both are existential, both are preventable, and both are inextricably linked through their reciprocal effects on each other. Climate change is generating conflict and instability in areas where the risk of nuclear proliferation is already high, and any use of nuclear weapons would have disastrous effects on an already fragile environment. By acknowledging the link between these two issues, we can advocate for more action on both.”
The Union of Concerned Scientists and Physicians for Social Responsibility are among the few sizeable national groups that focus in a significant fashion on both climate change and nuclear weapons. Martin Fleck recently left PSR after working for the organization for 27 years, including as director of its Nuclear Weapons Abolition Program. “The strongest connection between climate and disarmament activism is this,” he said. “Climate science and abundant climate indicators show us that planetary human survival depends upon a rather dramatic paradigm shift from the current status quo and the way we are living as a species. The paradigm shift will necessarily include abandoning current, outrageous levels of military spending, military activity, and threats.”
He then added, “Nuclear winter is not a climate issue and I do not think it should be viewed as a climate issue… However, advances in climate science led to our current understanding of nuclear winter and nuclear famine, and the people who have led the way have been climate scientists. So I guess it is fair to say that nuclear winter and nuclear famine models reside in the realm of climate science.”
Working in a state beset with intensive nuclear industries ever since the Los Alamos laboratory opened secretly in 1943, Jay Coghlan, executive director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico, had a one-word answer when I asked about relationships, communication, or joint efforts between the climate movement and groups focused on nuclear weapons: “Nonexistent.”
Nuclear winter, he said, “hasn’t been viewed as a climate issue at all. It is, of course, the ultimate climate-changer, should nuclear war break out.”
Carbon and Fission
In California, the Tri-Valley CAREs organization has worked for more than 40 years scrutinizing and challenging the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which was founded in 1952, mainly to develop the hydrogen bomb. Scott Yundt, the group’s executive director, told me that “nuclear winter should absolutely be viewed as a climate issue. It represents one of the most severe and abrupt potential disruptions to global ecological systems. Yet in many mainstream climate narratives, it’s rarely discussed. Perhaps this is because nuclear winter is perceived as hypothetical or tied to geopolitical scenarios rather than immediate climate threats.”
He then added:
“Within coalitions made up of frontline communities, including those impacted by the oil and gas industry, toxic waste, and uranium mining, there is a strong and growing understanding of the deep systemic links between these issues and our work in Livermore. We see clear consensus around themes like environmental racism, government secrecy, the lack of meaningful community engagement, and the disproportionate burdens placed on low-income and Indigenous communities. In those spaces, nuclear weapons are not seen as separate from the climate struggle. They’re considered part of the same legacy of environmental violence and extractive industry. There’s solidarity and shared purpose among those of us directly impacted. However, we’ve also noticed that mainstream climate organizations and funders often treat nuclear issues as fringe or outside the scope of ‘climate’ work… This disconnect can be frustrating, especially when the communities we work with are living through the environmental fallout of nuclear activities and see those harms as deeply entangled with climate injustices.”
Basav Sen, director of the Climate Policy Project at the Institute for Policy Studies, said that anti-nuclear and climate activists “both confront the same long-standing pattern of extractive environmental racism, which treats Indigenous, Black, Brown, and poor communities, and the land, water, and air they depend on, as disposable. In the southwestern U.S., the Pacific islands, and many other parts of the world, the very same communities who have been exposed to toxic radioactivity because of uranium mining and processing, nuclear weapons testing, and nuclear waste disposal, are also facing air and water pollution from fossil fuel extraction and burning, and from the consequences of fossil fuel burning such as droughts, wildfires, superstorms, and rising oceans.”
Yet, despite the convergence of those issues, Sen commented, “the degree of collaboration between these movements at the national and international level has not been significant. Locally and regionally, however, frontline communities impacted by climate change and by the nuclear weapons and nuclear energy supply chain have been consciously fighting these two systemic issues together.”
Since the mid-1980s, Jackie Cabasso has served as executive director of Western States Legal Foundation, one of the main groups tenaciously organizing against the Livermore lab. “Organizations such as my own have made serious efforts to reach out to climate activists since at least 2008,” she told me, adding that the outcomes have usually been disappointing. “From my perspective, the relationships, communications, and joint efforts have been mostly one-sided, with nuclear disarmament activists reaching out to climate activists and very little reciprocity.”
In addition, she has seen that “the climate movement generally seems to avoid addressing the climate impacts of wars and militarism. This is the case even though some individuals, and even some organizations, are involved in both sets of issues.”
A longtime leader of the Physicians for Social Responsibility chapter in the San Francisco area, Robert M. Gould, has devoted most of his national and regional work to climate change and related issues of environmental health. “While there has been an advance among organizations through the years on issues referable to environmental justice, there has been no significant uptake on issues of war/peace, nuclear weapons,” he wrote in an email. Gould added that, although nuclear winter “is a critical existential issue, there has been at most minimal uptake by the environmental movement, as with nuclear weapons and militarism in general.”
He also cited a major generational divide: “There are very few younger people involved in the anti-nuclear movement.”
Analyzing and Organizing
In the United States, the forces that have done so much to heat the planet and drive the nuclear arms race are today stronger than ever. The power of great wealth and huge corporations got us where we are now, with an escalating assault on nature and an unfathomable threat to humanity. Whatever connections (and differences) might exist between the ongoing war on the climate and the nonstop arrangements for possible nuclear annihilation, the superstructure making it all possible is right in front of us. Gauging its true dimensions is crucial for coming up with more strategic approaches.
These days, fatalism is an understandable feeling, but what’s truly needed is far greater support for activism. Organizers, whether for climate or against nuclear weapons, routinely face daunting obstacles. Funding is in short supply. The politics in Washington are, quite obviously, the worst in memory. And as activists struggle to make an impact, mainstream media outlets habitually skim the surface or, more likely, ignore the issues completely.
Media blind spots include the fact that military industries are big contributors to the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, while the Pentagon uses more fossil fuel than any other institution on the globe. And the U.S. government’s destabilizing war policies in the Middle East — where flashpoints could set off a nuclear war — are directly tied in with Washington’s perennial quest for ever more profitable access to the massive oil reserves in the region. Even if unwilling to directly address the dangers of nuclear weapons, the climate movement could do more to challenge a foreign policy that boosts both carbon emissions and the risk that rampant militarism could end up triggering nuclear winter.
With adversaries in common, the climate movement and activists for nuclear disarmament have an unexplored potential to work together. In profound ways, they could become effective allies in helping to save the world from unimaginable disasters.
This piece first appeared on TomDispatch.
The post Is Nuclear Winter a Climate Issue? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.
