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nuclear war
The Climate Reckoning That the Nuclear Arms Control Can’t Ignore
Climate change and nuclear weapons reinforce one another in dangerous ways: Environmental stress increases the risk of conflict, while nuclear conflict would produce environmental consequences on a planetary scale.
May 07, 2026
At 8:15 AM on August 6, 1945, a 9,000-pound atomic bomb detonated 1,900 feet above Hiroshima, instantly killing 70,000 people. Three days later, a second bomb exploded over Nagasaki, killing another 40,000.
The sheer scale of destruction—that humans could annihilate each other by means as violent as a nuclear blast—ensured that Hiroshima and Nagasaki would become the defining images of nuclear weapons in the American imagination. According to a 2025 Pew Research survey, 83% of Americans reported knowing at least something about the use of nuclear weapons in Japan. However, increasingly large numbers of younger Americans don’t know enough about nuclear weapons today to give an opinion on their role in national security.
What is often remembered as the only detonation of nuclear weapons in history remains the sole use of nuclear weapons in warfare. While Americans looked overseas at the devastation in Japan, fewer recognized that nuclear weapons were also transforming the American environment at home.
For decades after World War II, nuclear weapons reshaped landscapes and communities across the United States. Between 1945 and 1992, the United States conducted 1,030 nuclear tests, while producing tens of thousands of warheads during the Cold War. At its height, the US nuclear stockpile comprised 31,255 warheads, with the last fully functional nuclear weapon being produced in 1989. The environmental and human consequences of this effort extended far beyond test sites and production facilities. Yet, the US government kept the public in the dark, leaving a generation born in the 21st century to bear the consequences of its obfuscated proliferation campaign.
The Nuclear Transformation of Marginalized America
Consider that the plutonium used in the first nuclear test in New Mexico and in the Nagasaki bomb was produced at the Hanford Site in Washington State. Between 1945 and 1970, Hanford’s reactors discharged roughly 444 billion gallons of radioactive wastewater into the Columbia River basin, a watershed that today supports over 8 million residents.
Other sites tell similar stories. In South Carolina and Georgia, rural communities were displaced to make way for the Savannah River Site nuclear weapons facility, where millions of gallons of radioactive waste were stored in underground tanks.
Make no mistake, the United States federal government was calculated in its targeting of marginalized communities to isolate radioactive material from the general population. These facilities were often located in rural or economically disadvantaged areas, where political resistance was limited and land was cheaper.
Nuclear weapons represent one of the most profound environmental risks humanity has ever created.
Currently the only permanent waste site for nuclear material in the United States, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in Carlsbad, New Mexico, collects plutonium-contaminated waste to be buried over 2,000 feet underground a salt flat formation. Framed as a barren wasteland far from major population centers, WIPP is in Eddy County, New Mexico—home to a population of over 61,000 people, of which 64% identify as people of color. Many communities face contaminated water supplies and elevated rates of respiratory illness, kidney disease, and cancer: a pattern sometimes described as “radioactive colonialism.”
Despite the government’s efforts to isolate nuclear activities and waste disposal, radioactive contamination did not respect geographic boundaries. Research released in 2023 found that nuclear tests conducted between 1945 and 1962 distributed radioactive fallout across 46 of the lower 48 contiguous states in the United States, as well as parts of Canada and Mexico. As a result of nuclear tests conducted by both the United States and other nuclear-armed powers, radioactive isotopes released into the atmosphere spread throughout the world in communities far from test sites. By the 1960s, “there was no place on Earth where the signature of atmospheric nuclear testing could not be found in soil, water, and even polar ice.” Radioactive isotopes entered the food chain through plants and animals, creating pathways of exposure far from any test site.
For most people living far from testing areas, these exposures were small. But they illustrate a fundamental reality of nuclear weapons: Even carefully controlled programs produce global environmental consequences. Even when the government attempted to isolate radioactivity and testing in supposedly remote communities, contamination from weapons production, testing, and disposal still spread far beyond those sites, affecting environments across the world.
The Renewed Nuclear Arms Race
While the United States has not conducted a full-scale nuclear test since 1992, nuclear competition is accelerating again.
China is rapidly expanding its nuclear arsenal, with estimates suggesting that its stockpile could exceed 1,000 warheads by the early 2030s. At the same time, arms control agreements that once constrained the world’s largest nuclear powers are eroding. The expiration of the New START treaty in February 2026 removed the last formal limits on US and Russian strategic nuclear forces.
Even if informal limits remain in place, the collapse of binding agreements signals a shift toward a less regulated nuclear environment. Some policymakers have suggested that renewed nuclear testing may be necessary in response to foreign advances, which would risk repeating many of the mistakes of the Cold War.
Consider that for the first time in history, the new nuclear proliferation environment includes a three-way standoff between three major armed powers: the United States, China, and Russia.
Mutually Assured Climate Destruction
A global nuclear war alone would be enough to trigger catastrophic climatic effects. Even a limited nuclear exchange could inject vast quantities of smoke and soot into the upper atmosphere, blocking sunlight and lowering global temperatures. The use of a mere 2% of the world’s current arsenal could trigger severe cooling and agricultural disruption, leaving 2 billion people at risk of starvation in just the following two years. If nuclear winter renders any use of nuclear weapons as unsurvivable, then deterrence may be an inadequate strategy, since the consequences of a miscalculation or accidental launch would increase dramatically.
This erosion of international nonproliferation channels comes as climate change fuels geopolitical instability by intensifying resource competition, migration pressures, and regional conflicts, increasing the risk of confrontation among nuclear-armed states. Climate change and nuclear weapons therefore reinforce one another in dangerous ways: Environmental stress increases the risk of conflict, while nuclear conflict would produce environmental consequences on a planetary scale.
Bridging the Gap: Building the Next Generation of Advocates
Despite these connections, environmental and social justice concerns remain peripheral in most nuclear policy debates. Discussions of deterrence and arms control typically focus on military balance and strategic stability, while the environmental legacy of nuclear weapons receives far less attention.
This gap may help explain why nuclear policy often struggles to engage younger generations.
Surveys consistently show that climate change is one of the defining concerns of younger voters. Roughly 70% of young people report deep anxiety about environmental degradation and say they are likely to support candidates who prioritize climate policy. Nuclear weapons policy rarely speaks to these concerns directly. Yet nuclear weapons represent one of the most profound environmental risks humanity has ever created.
Reframing nuclear policy to include environmental and social justice considerations would not only reflect historical reality, but also make nuclear policy more relevant to the challenges of the 21st century.
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Not Just an Abstract Moral Appeal: Ending the Nuclear Age Is a Requirement for Survival
Humanity faces a choice, whether consciously or not, to continue down a path of conflict that leads toward ultimate destruction or to renounce its old ways and center peace at the heart of all its efforts.
May 01, 2026
This speech was delivered to the 11th Review Conference of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons on May 1, 2026.
Honorable President, Distinguished Delegates, Colleagues, and Friends,
We are living in a decisive moment. Humanity faces a choice, whether consciously or not, to continue down a path of conflict that leads toward ultimate destruction or to renounce its old ways and center peace at the heart of all its efforts.
International law, built painstakingly over decades and even centuries to prevent such an unfathomable catastrophe, is under brazen and relentless attack today. At the heart of this divergence lies a fundamental question: whether states may claim a right to wage war without restraint, and whether use and even possession of weapons with potential to end human civilization can ever be justified. These are precisely the issues at the core of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT)—whose future we have gathered to discuss at this Review Conference.
Nuclear disarmament and nuclear non-proliferation are not separate tracks toward a safer world—they are intertwined and inseparable paths.
Our world is a time-ticking bomb. There are more than 12,000 nuclear warheads in existence—each capable of killing hundreds of thousands, some even millions of people, and any one of which could trigger a chain reaction leading to full-scale nuclear war in less time than this session will last.
More than 40 years ago, Presidents Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev reminded us that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” And yet today, we hear renewed calls to use nuclear weapons in the name of “saving lives,” alongside threats that contemplate the destruction of entire societies.
The five nuclear-weapon states recognized under the NPT, the United States, the Russian Federation, the United Kingdom, France, and China, possess over 95% of the world’s nuclear arsenal. With that power comes not only a moral responsibility, but a clear legal obligation under Article VI of this Treaty: to pursue negotiations in good faith to achieve not only nuclear disarmament, but also total and complete general disarmament.
Nuclear disarmament and nuclear non-proliferation are not separate tracks toward a safer world—they are intertwined and inseparable paths. As Joseph Rotblat warned in his 1995 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech: “If the militarily most powerful and least threatened states need nuclear weapons for their security, how can one deny such security to countries that are truly insecure? The present nuclear policy is a recipe for proliferation. It is a policy for disaster.”
We join the voices of hibakusha and countless others who have come before us in urging all NPT States Parties to take immediate and meaningful action:
- Condemn and cease all military combat, including wars that risk escalation toward nuclear conflict, and reaffirm the primacy of international law and peaceful resolution of disputes.
- Unequivocally renounce the use or threat of use of nuclear weapons under any circumstances, and reject policies such as “launch on warning” and “first-use” that heighten, rather than reduce, the risk of nuclear war.
- Commit to a concrete, time-bound path toward a world free of nuclear weapons, including by joining the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. The first step in this journey must be clear to all: The United States and the Russian Federation, which together possess more than 85% of the world’s nuclear arsenals, must urgently restart bilateral negotiations to reduce and ultimately eliminate their stockpiles. The remaining nuclear-armed states must pause all modernization and arsenal increase programs, and commit to a transparent, verifiable, and irreversible process of disarmament.
- Recognize and assist all victims of the nuclear age, including survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, those impacted by more than 2,000 nuclear explosions during the so-called nuclear testing period, and uranium mining workers and others harmed by the the development of nuclear weapons, ensuring justice, support, and environmental remediation.
This call is not just an abstract moral appeal; it is a prerequisite for human survival. The credibility of the NPT and the future of humanity depend on the actions we take over the next three weeks.
In the words of Joseph Rotblat: “The quest for a war-free world has a basic purpose: survival. But if in the process we learn how to achieve it by love rather than by fear, by kindness rather than by compulsion; if in the process we learn to combine the essential with the enjoyable, the expedient with the benevolent, the practical with the beautiful, that will be an extra incentive to embark on this great task.”
Thank you, Honorable President.
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Destroying Civilizations: Our MADness and Nuclear Winter
A reminder that the Trump administration wasn’t the first to threaten the civilizational destruction of a country.
Apr 27, 2026
In a memorandum to President Lyndon Johnson in 1964, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara wrote that “the current strategic posture” of the United States “is to destroy both the Soviet Union and Communist China as viable societies even after a well-planned and executed surprise attack on our forces.”
In a 1967 speech in San Francisco that he called “Mutual Deterrence,” the formal introduction to the public of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD), McNamara said “we must be able to absorb the total weight of nuclear attack on our country — on our retaliatory forces, on our command and control apparatus, on our industrial capacity, on our cities, and on our population — and still be capable of damaging the aggressor to the point that his society would be simply no longer viable in twentieth-century terms.” McNamara described this as “our assured-destruction capability.”
What this means is that the Trump administration wasn’t the first to threaten the civilizational destruction of a country. That threat has been embedded in the conceptual framework of the MAD US nuclear posture since at least 1967, which includes the perverse menace to absorb “the total weight of nuclear attack” on our own country. No president since then, or defense secretary or national security adviser, or majority party of Congress, has thought to get ourselves and the rest of the world out of the MAD policy.
In the 1960s, there was little to no knowledge of nuclear winter as a nuclear-war induced catastrophic climate effect. However, a 1963 classified nuclear war-game study by President Kennedy’s National Security Council, which described “the combined effects on survivors of radiation, blast, fires, floods, substandard diet and sanitary conditions, and lack of medical services and care” of a nuclear exchange between the United States and Soviet Union should have sufficiently informed McNamara of at least the direct effects of absorbing the full weight of a Soviet nuclear attack. The same war-games study also estimated US fatalities from 63 million to 134 million and Soviet fatalities from 136 million to 143 million. The US MAD nuclear posture was developed in the immediate aftermath of this report.
The thinking among MAD policy planners at the time, and today, is that rational actors on both the US and Soviet side would not launch a nuclear first-strike knowing that it would be suicidal for the country that launched first.
This is one of several MAD fallacies. For example, last year, three academics in New Zealand authored a study titled, “The Frequently Impaired Health of Leaders of Nuclear Weapons States.” They reported personality disorders, substance use disorders, multi-infarct dementia, depression, and anxiety among a sizeable percentage of leaders. The authors concluded: “These findings indicate that physical and mental health conditions among leaders of these nuclear weapon states have been common.” They advised: “Given the importance of the decision-making around nuclear weapons by political leaders, further research on this group should be prioritized.”
Twenty years after McNamara established Mutual Assured Destruction as US nuclear policy, Carl Sagan’s pioneering study, “Nuclear Winter: Global Consequences of Multiple Nuclear Explosions,” published in the journal Science in 1983, opened the door to extensive scientific study of the climate-related effects of nuclear war.
Using more sophisticated climate models as applied to nuclear winter, prominent climate scientists reported in Nature Food in 2022 that “more than 2 billion people could die from nuclear war between India and Pakistan, and more than 5 billion could die from a war between the United States and Russia, underlining the importance of global cooperation in preventing nuclear war.”
Alan Robock, a coauthor of the study and a leading climate scientist from Rutgers University, had previously described nuclear winter as follows: “Nuclear winter is the term for a theory describing the climatic effects of nuclear war. Smoke from the fires started by nuclear weapons, especially the black, sooty smoke from cities and industrial facilities, would be heated by the Sun, lofted into the upper atmosphere, and spread globally, lasting for years. The resulting cool, dark, dry conditions at Earth’s surface would prevent crop growth for at least one growing season, resulting in mass starvation over most of the world… More people could die in the noncombatant countries than in those where the bombs were dropped, because of these indirect effects… A nuclear war between India and Pakistan could produce so much smoke that it would produce global environmental change unprecedented in human history… The only way to be sure to prevent the climatic effects of nuclear war is to rid the world of nuclear weapons.”
Writing in 2021 in “Ending Nuclear Weapons Before They End US,” Australian physician Tilman Ruff, co-founder of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), warned: “Evidence of the consequences of nuclear war, particularly global climatic and nutritional effects of the abrupt ice age conditions from even a relatively small regional nuclear war, indicates that these are more severe than previously sought. None of the nine nuclear-armed states is disarming… Abrogation of existing nuclear arms control agreements, policies of first nuclear use and war fighting, growing armed conflicts worldwide, and increasing use of information and cyberwarfare, exacerbate dangers of nuclear war.”
An added stress today is the fact that “nuclear armed countries are considering the integration of artificial intelligence into existing nuclear command, control, and communications structures as a way to increase speed and efficiency,” thus adding to the “already unacceptable level of risk,” as ICAN reports. The ICAN-identified risks include reduced decision-making time and rapid escalation, perceived increases in vulnerability that incentivizes nuclear weapon use, cyber risks, and data poisoning.
President Trump, who inherited the MAD-based strategic nuclear posture from previous administrations, would do well to focus on preventing nuclear war/nuclear winter now by negotiating a permanent cessation of military action in and against Iran, a conflict that embodies any number of escalatory scenarios to nuclear war. Trump could then be the first US president to convene a summit of all nine nuclear-armed states—the United States, Russia, China, the U.K., France, India, Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea—to begin the process of abolishing nuclear weapons, including by joining the 2017 UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapon. Trump could propose the idea to China’s President Xi during their upcoming bilateral summit next month in Beijing.
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